Episode 61 Summary:
In Episode 61, Peter Joseph continues his module-by-module exploration of Integral with a walkthrough of the Cooperative Organization System (COS)—one of Integral’s five subsystems, responsible for bringing people, materials, tools, and production processes together to build and distribute goods and services.
COS is presented as Integral’s non-market production-coordination framework, translating certified designs from the Open Access Design System (OAD) into executable plans adapted to each community node’s capacities and constraints. Alongside organizing production, it generates the real-world labor, resource, ecological, and operational data that Integral’s economic calculations depend on.
The episode walks through all nine modules of the COS:
- Production planning and work breakdown
- Labor organization and skill matching
- Resource procurement and materials management
- Cooperative workflow execution
- Capacity, throughput, and constraint balancing
- Distribution and access flow coordination
- Quality assurance and safety verification
- Cooperative coordination and inter-co-op integration
- Transparency ledger and audit
The walkthrough explains how COS supplies the Integral Time Credit (ITC) system with evidence for two distinct calculations: recognizing people’s contributions and determining access obligations for goods and services. It also shows how production records support the Feedback and Review System (FRS) in monitoring conditions, identifying trends, and maintaining accountability.
Rather than a fixed, one-way production pipeline, Joseph describes a self-correcting cooperative network in which information about skill shortages, bottlenecks, ecological impacts, reliability, and availability continually returns to the processes that can respond.
The episode concludes with practical scenarios involving community transport sharing and a proposed off-grid communication network, illustrating how Integral’s subsystems could work together as local nodes develop shared infrastructure and progressively reduce dependence on the existing market economy.
Other ways to listen:
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN2TM83Dp70
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/3L8OzfB6r1VbOfeAeinnSw
Podbean: https://revolutionnow.podbean.com/
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/revolution-now/id1530637420
Transcript:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now!, episode 61
So once again, I apologize for the ridiculous delay between podcasts. I’ve been stretched extremely thin with current projects, and what I wanted to do today for this episode was tackle both the COS and a CDS prototype I’ve been working with with a small team. And sadly, even after months, uh, and 12-hour days, the prototype isn’t what it needs to be yet for live presentation, which was the goal.
But it’s very close, and the moment it is working, I will be rapidly back to, uh, follow up. But we have a lot to cover with the COS, and this is gonna be a very long episode anyway, so timing is actually okay. The COS, as I hope people know by now, is the Cooperative Organization System. This will be explored as an expansion and clarification of the white paper, along with principles behind it, and I’ll give some notable use cases at the end, which I think are important to highlight.
As noted, the COS is the core answer in the physical space of replacing the capitalist mode of production major part of that with the OAD and of course Integral in totality. But this deals with the down-to-earth physical development of goods and services. And through this, hopefully traditional corporations and the traditional industrial market network can be made actually obsolete.
It’s about community development from the ground up, a node or a local community creating their own means of production literally to allow for an increasingly off-the-grid existence from the toxic market system in a transitional process. With the best analog in the early stages of development being already existing mutual aid networks that we see marginally across the world.
And since I mentioned the CDS and prototyping, I know everyone, including me, is trying to figure out the most productive way to get momentum going on this overall difficult development. Integral, since the release of the white paper, there’s been a wide range of experimentation with people working on different things across Discord, other platforms, and privately sent to me via email.
Lots of unique interpretations and ideas and experimentation, which is really great to see. But since nothing of this magnitude has ever been attempted at the grassroots level, or even Linux wasn’t truly built by pure volunteers, I’ve decided to work with a few professionals, as I mentioned prior, to get the bare bones programming off the ground as I see it and to kind of set a precedent to really secure a starting point, hence the CDS prototype I’ll present soon.
I think if people can just see a minimal working example, not technicals or narratives abstracted on paper, it can spark a far deeper and relatable sense of understanding and contribution Ultimately, the open source nature of all this will prevail. The code, the prototypes, the versions will all live on GitHub, et cetera, for open source improvement.
While the prototypes themselves will have feedback mechanisms on what’s being constructed inside of them. So if a person downloads the beta off the website, they can work with it. Uh, if they find something, a flaw in the UI or they feel the logic is wrong, they have a direct message that they can send to the dev team to look at it.
Not everyone who sees a correction can go to, say, GitHub and do coding work, so feedback from normal experience is obviously important. So that will be built into these prototypes. And again, to be clear, I’m not dismissing the importance of the white paper. I’m saying that it’s difficult, I think, for people to interpret it, and people fall victim to certain specificity, and they get caught up in the, in the nuance of the way it’s been approached as opposed to the big picture.
And that’s what I’m trying to get through with these primitive prototypes that will be, again, hopefully out soon, starting with the CDS. Okay, that out of the way, I wanna say something quick about “Zeitgeist Requiem,” which I’ve been irresponsibly sidelining with everything happening with Integral, and I really need to recover financially, to be frank, uh, and get that thing out there, even though I will likely release it for free initially, maybe in totality.
It depends how– It depends on a lot of things I won’t even go into. But due to the urgency of what’s happening in the world and the message of Integral, which is the end solution in the film, which is why, again, I’m focused on Integral because I want the film to have a purpose rather than being inspiring or educating.
I want people to know that there is something we can actually do tangibly While I’m a big fan of my other films, they hint at solutions, they suggest a way of thinking, but they don’t, like most, most people that talk about post-scarcity, the actual way to get there, the actual institutional development, the actual system dynamics are not described in any detail, and that’s precisely what In-Integral is attempting to solve.
Working system. So I’m very proud actually of this film more than the other three. And once a dedicated site is live, the plan is to try and do a coordinated global screening weekend. If anyone’s interested in doing that, there’s no charge. You know, you know, I would have a download of the high-res film.
People could screen it, and then shortly after that one weekend, it goes online for free, and hopefully can, hopefully can gain some traction. And of course, farther down the road, it goes to SVOD and VOD and Apple TV, Prime, Tubi, all that kind of traditional stuff through my distributor, physical DVDs and Blu-rays.
There’ll be a companion book to it because as it is always with these films or anything that’s challenging, you have to have a supplemental document when people question what you’re talking about. In this film, there’s an enormous amount of detail and history and surmised inference, if you will, where things are said in a blanketed way because you have to generalize in a film which is rooted more emotionally than technically, hence the need for a companion guide, which will, you know, overlap at some point with a full Integral text that I have also been working on.
Oh, and one more thing on that. I will try to do more of an international development for this film. There’s always been multilingual attributes to all these films, but they don’t really get out there. So one of the things, if anyone has any suggestions, but because it’s a big world and Integral is a global concept, I’m gonna try and get this film quickly not just subtitled, but actually narrated in other languages, uh, so it can instantly have a large potential audience outside the US.
Um, while this film does have a certain Western-centric view, if you will, because it’s very critical of dominant patterns that are kind of origin-oriented to the West, uh, it of course, it goes way beyond that. And yes, I think that’s sufficient. Let’s now move on to the COS. First, the broad view. As we know, Integral is a proposed non-market-based economy organized through five connected systems.
The Collaborative Design System or the Collaborative Decision System, excuse me, the CDS, establishes democratic direction of a node. The Open Access Design System, the OAD, facilitates open source community development designs for production. Integral Time Credit Systems, the ITC system, handles the contribution access value relationship.
Productions of the total system have value in ITCs, while human contribution does as well in hour-based values. And I will talk a lot more about this largely misunderstood system as we go along, as it links directly to the COS very specifically. Then we have the Feedback and Review System, FRS, which examines overall conditions of the total system, returning signals to help adaptation, correction, improvement.
It’s like the health monitoring system, if you will, of a node, of a community. And then we have finally the COS, the Cooperative Organization System, that works within all those relationships, bringing people, materials, tools, and production processes together in co-ops to build and distribute the goods and services.
In the most basic procedure, the COS takes a certified design from the OAD, together with any relevant priorities or boundaries from the Collaborative Decision System, the CDS, and it converts that information into a physical production process, adapting to node constraints and capacities in that transformation Now, that core function stated, it also does something else.
Not only does it organize production, including forming and reforming cooperatives, breaking work into specific tasks, connecting voluntary participants’ labor, sourcing the materials, and coordinating tools and schedules, along with external sourcing in the traditional market economy when needed, which is covered extensively in the white paper as this is, again, a transitional project.
It also critically, secondly, generates economic calculation information for the ITC system. Labor hours, material use, availability, consumption patterns or regarded ecological effects, constraints, failure statistics, and so on. You get the idea. And the Integral Time Credit system uses this data in access and contribution value calculations, which again, we’ll be exploring as well as we go.
But before we go on that second point, I want to quickly revisit the very idea of economic calculation in market economics because this contrast matters We all know the famed economic calculation or information problem put forward by various people such as Hayek, Mises, Friedman, and many others. They claim prices and only prices can coordinate dispersed knowledge about scarcity, effort, preference, and the like.
And in the well-established religious traditional market lexicon, no central planner will ever do better. It has become a kind of anti-science religious dogma. The conclusion that design itself, AKA planning, can never coordinate an economy better than price. And I was trying to find a fallacy category for this kind of thing, and the best phrase I found was the static fallacy, which occurs when someone takes a set of constraints, tools, or computational limits from a specific historical moment and treats them as permanent, immutable laws of nature.
And if you do speak with a market economist, and by the way, you may notice I never use just the term economist when talking about the market context because market economists are not economists at all by definition. But if you do speak with them and find that they do agree that the coordination of the price mechanism may be recreated or even surpassed by some technical approach without price, they often culminate a different fallacy, arguing that it has never worked in the past and hence it will never work in the future.
That’s called the fallacy of antecedent, the assumption that because something has not happened or succeeded in the past, it is fundamentally impossible for it to succeed in the future. And on that, when we look back at the past and ask when this kind of thing has ever been tried, what happens, of course, everyone says, “Well, the USSR,” which did in fact circumvent price feedback in various ways with its Gosplan.
For example, when the state tried to bypass price discovery by calculating millions of individual quotas and administrative prices by hand which is insane for like the 1920s or even the 1960s. You know, that’s clearly a very difficult thing to do with the limited means they had. But there was also an approach problem.
In fact, much could be said about the approach itself, regardless of the obviously overwhelming mass data comprehension, um, which really requires a kind of real-time flow, which I’ll get to in a moment. And both Stafford Beer and, by extension, Salvador Allende looked at that cybernetic attempt by the USSR when they were working in Chile on Project Cybersyn, which I’ll get to in a moment, and they recognized something very clear.
The USSR did not honor the decentralized principles of such a system and maintained their very top-down method overlaid against these cybernetic principles, basically sabotaging them, which made the whole system very rigid, as we know in the historical complaint, and why it was generally a strained and brittle system.
Um, even though we should be honest about this 70-year history that this was employed, and yes, it did work to a degree. It’s not like it was just one cascading collapse and failure and starvation after another or something. So many people speak of the USSR like it was one giant economic failure. No, it wasn’t.
But it was a top-down command economy in the truest sense, and that very idea was antithetical to true cybernetic principles and hence optimization. And you could see the brittle and un- unstable and unbalancing nature of what they attempted to do with that overlay. So okay, there’s that. History. Well, what else?
Well, in stark contrast, we do have Project Cybersyn, as just alluded to. Stafford Beer in the 1970s didn’t focus on hand calculation. It was about information relay in real time with program filtering in the early age of computers. Cybersyn bypassed the price mechanism by using physical and operational metrics, quantified flow charts of production inputs and outputs notably, as it worked to preserve local operational freedom while maintaining macro systemic coordination.
Factories were treated as self-regulating organisms that could manage their own internal variables using the network primarily for lateral coordination and early warning signs and stuff like that, um, rather than of course dictating this kind of micro price relationship as the ultimate binding thread.
And as we know, once again, Cybersyn was shut down before it ever got up and running by the coup that overthrew Allende, uh, putting in Pinochet, a dictator that was literally supported by the entire free market crowd. And what was the narrative that was created as well with that? You know, in my film, I have all these people, Nixon, Hayek, Friedman, uh, talking about Chile and the overthrow, and they didn’t outright say anything about Cybersyn, but the fundamental excuse was he was overthrown by the people because his economic system didn’t work.
His democratic socialism didn’t work. Uh, and of course, that is the mantra, uh, which bleed, which bleeds again right over into central planning just doesn’t work. You see, see how the propaganda snowballs. So enough of that tangent Integral, hence, is in the spirit of Stafford Beer, if you will, built on cybernetic networking and data management with dynamics linked by feedback flows that can, without question, manage complexity far beyond what the price mechanism can handle.
There is no debate about the potential and capacity. It is only the challenge of proper calibrated design. And the COS is where the raw economic data for calculation and coordination comes from as a transformation of the design originating in the OAD. And again, we’ll be covering this more so. So sure, supply and demand remains relevant.
Yes, the price mechanism does handle that in a distorted way, but that’s its, that’s its big thing, the, you know, the supply and demand curve of Economics 101. But Integral also accounts for energy use, material regeneration, repair requirements statistically, equitable access critically, and many sustainability factors, and an overall strategy of comprehensive accounting.
Accounting rooted not only in the true technicals of labor, resources, and energy, but in, but in human diversity as well, capacity and need, a social layer of calculation, all designed with the intent to lead to a sustainable, improving, self-improving, efficient, balancing, life-supporting outcome. Is this experimental territory?
Well, of course it is to a degree. But the basic data synthesis structure is really no different from the advanced manufacturing inventory and distribution systems we see today, which are incredibly advanced, and Integral simply expands that context. Now, the OAD, the Open Access Design system, does an initial accounting of what a design is expected to require: labor, materials, tools, ecological effects, life cycle demands, seeking to reduce unnecessary effort and unnecessary resource use while meeting the design’s requirements, as talked about in the last podcast.
If anyone hasn’t seen that, please go back and review that Its output is essentially a structured body of production knowledge and anticipated outcomes, which bleeds over into the ITC system, uh, again, which was covered in the last podcast. But it’s not the record of the actual production of a particular item or batch of items.
That reality hasn’t occurred yet, and hence that is where the COS comes in. And hence the core data output once again comes from that physical record of what’s actually been done. And there are two overall calculation types that it feeds, which is essentially the core of the ITC system. Two overall calculation categories.
One concerns contribution recognition, how the work someone performed is recognized, taking account of the task, its demands, and relevant circumstances. The other concerns access obligations, what is required where applicable to obtain a good or service considering production effort, ecology, availability, fairness, and the like.
The CDS establishes any policies or boundaries by which those calculations operate when needed, but the variables are inferentially derived based on the ground-up logic of what needs to be accounted for to calculate, again, a comprehensive value, which is largely a self-evident process. Now, as an aside, someone accustomed to market terminology may hear this kind of thing.
I’ve gotten so many emails about this. They hear contribution recognition and they hear access obligation and they think, “So you’re calculating the price of a product and the pay of the worker. Aha, imitating the price system, I see.” No. I point this out because this is a common sort of Ludwig von Mises, um I, I think in Hayek as well, other people that were looking at these early attempts and they decided that comedically and satirically to make fun of these approaches as they saw it, they said, “Oh, they’re just trying to recreate the price system.”
No. Uh, at the most basic economic foundation, everything has a cost in the true sense of the word, a toll. You take a mineral out of the earth, you have made a transformation that needs to be accounted for. Like the phrase it’s going to cost you in the sense of something that you must be prepared for as a repercussion of an action.
And while the word economy comes from oeconomia, which just means the management of a household, there is that thermodynamic reality, if you will, that nothing moves or transforms without a repercussion. Cut down a forest, it may cost you the loss of many animal species and so forth. So on the level of acquiring a good or service, you have to account for the true cost, which is exactly what markets avoid, hence negative market externalities, displaced costs, unaccounted for costs which defines the entire state of market capitalism itself.
The entire global society, as I’ve said before, if you consolidated it into one business enterprise, the collective human business corporation, it operates on a perpetual deficit and is literally bankrupt on paper at all times because it ignores the true costs of everything going on in the world. The entire world in this capitalist construct is a completely and utterly failed business project on the market’s own terms, in fact.
So that is economic cost. And as far as these credits or income or wage or rate or salary or pay or whatever synonym you’re trying to throw in there, what integral is doing is vastly different than what the market economy is doing. First, to coordinate a society with more than just a few people requires specialization to a degree in the sense that not everyone can simultaneously build a farm and design their own computer code and get some– cut some hair or make shoes or whatever.
There must be a distribution of labor, needless to say. So you have to find a way to facilitate output for overall human life by averaging everyone’s contribution in this complex network of distributed labor So regardless of what you do as your role in society to help, your task to keep things going in the fruit of progress and wealth and satisfying public health, you have to have the overall fruits of the system available to you as needed.
That’s the logic that is grounded. And sorry I’m being abstract here, but this is the only way it can work if there’s any morality to a culture. For thousands of years now, since ancient Sumer as a good example, the whole of society has evolved this dis– this grotesque fusion between market dynamics, zero-sum competitive dynamics, exploiting scarcity, and this cultural hegemonic hierarchical establishment, this, this permeating disease of monarchy and elitism and plutocracy that superimposes itself.
What has tended to happen over the years is the market structure has basically remained while the cultural hierarchical imposition has morphed in various ways. And of course, upon the Enlightenment, the idea was we just move everything into the market if possible, in the free market, and we’ll sidestep the, uh, cultural hierarchical hegemonic attribute which is artificially imposed, uh, in a religious sense That of course wasn’t the case, and sorry for this even more side tangent.
What happened was the market actually creates the hierarchical hegemonic imposition and elitism. It’s just doing it procedurally as opposed to having religious decree. And basically throughout this entire history, there’s been a permanent underclass that has been abused, left behind due to the resulting hierarchy.
Today, those in society that are taking from the collective output, not through direct exchange, meaning the cliché phrase of earning a living, but rather through subsidy, they are debased because it’s not acceptable to gain from the society at large, at least in this way. You’ll have that nonsense about wealth creation and, you know, ooh, capitalism created your cell phone, uh, as if it justifies all the other patterns, as if it’s even a viable premise anyway.
Capitalism doesn’t create anything. But the poor people that are getting subs- subsidized, that are on welfare, they are freeloaders, they are welfare queens and all of that. It’s an elitist psychology that has been created essentially by the system and its scarcity-based competitive nature, once again, that prefers inequality to balance, which is an untenable, morally horrible, unstable condition with all of this rhetoric that everyone wants everyone to have good public health instead of billionaires flying over seas of poverty-stricken people saturated in structural violence.
That said, coming back to my original point, the true position for economy to sustain human life on the level of basic human rights for all, which is what this is, combines reciprocity for contribution to the economic engine, work, with a general level of total support by way of the aggregated fruits of the total system’s capacity Credits in the context of Integral are an energy exchange with the system, part of a unified effort to make things work.
In contrast to market payment, which is fundamentally extractive, and that is not a semantic distinction. It’s structural. To state the obvious, because I want to make this 100% clear, in a market, a wage is what someone else pays you to take your time. It comes from an employer, and the pay has to come out of their revenue, revenue they’d rather keep, right?
Which means the relationship is completely adversarial by structure. Your gain in survival is their cost and loss. And it’s not an explicitly moral failing of behavior. Once again, it’s arithmetic. It is the structure. Every dollar of wage is a dollar out of profit margin, which is why the entire history of industrial labor is a history of conflict and why wages track bargaining power far more reliably than they track contribution.
Now, an ITC isn’t paid by anyone. It’s created by the system when work is verified and dissolved into the system when access occurs. Nobody is out anything when you’re credited, and nobody gains what you spend. It’s not exchanged. There’s no counterparty, which means there’s no adversary. Remove the counterparty and you remove the entire structure of extraction, the incentive to underpay, the incentive to overcharge, the incentive to manufacture scarcity, and on and on and on, as we see in today’s hideous market economy.
Second on this, a wage is a claim on other people’s labor that circulates indefinitely. You can hold it, hoard it, people can lend it to others at interest, inherit it, use it to buy things that generate more of it, capital. So money begets money, and that compounding is how you get a world with billionaires above seas of poverty once again.
ITCs can’t do any of that. They’re non-transferable, they can’t accrue interest, they are not based on debt, and they can’t be invested, and they vanish upon use. They are a kind of metabolic record of contribution, not a store of power over others, as money is. And the third thing I’ll say on this point, the trajectory runs the opposite direction.
A market needs your dependence on wages and hence scarcity to be permanent. That is the mechanism that gets people to work, the structural coercion Integral is explicitly trying to make ITCs less relevant over time, as noted, moving toward post-scarcity. It’s built into Integral, the trend trajectory. As the system gets more efficient, as designs improve, as things become abundant, access values start to move toward zero, and hence less requirements for credits at all.
So if you ever hear people conflate this thing, reading the white paper or whatever, or you’re talking about it, and they just conflate, you know, wages, uh, with Integral Time Credits as if they’re basically the same thing, they miss the point entirely. Both involve work, and both do involve access. But one is negotiated transfer between opposed parties, money permanently required, accumulated into power, while the other, the ITCs, is a temporary bookkeeping mechanism inside a system trying to abolish the need for the system as it learns to constantly do more with less, which is, again, the true nature of economic wealth So back to my broader point, people contribute to the system that sustains the community, and they draw support from it simultaneously.
But that reciprocity also doesn’t mean every individual must contribute an identical amount or that everyone needs to be matched equally by their personal contribution. As I put in the white paper, differences in people’s capacity, disability, and temporary hardship are fairness provisions that are directly a part of the system itself.
And to run this into the ground, supporting people is not postponed until some magical efficiency is realized or assumed high enough, as if we can’t do it yet. It’s part of what the system is organized to accomplish at its root, which is a true universal human rights mandate built into the system. So there’s no charity in Integral.
That idea just doesn’t exist because the system’s economic calculation is inclusive, accounting not only for the true physical factors of production and distribution, but for differences in human ability, ensuring that if you are a part of the system, you are taken care of to the degree the total system efficiency achieves, always.
And once again, by force of the nature of the larger order calculation, always moving towards post-scarcity and more with less. Um, I could say a great deal about all of that, and sorry if I’m very emphatic, but I guess I get frustrated when I see people’s interpretations wrong on some of these mechanisms.
If you have– In fact, I’ll kind of touch upon this when we get to the co-op description, COS, and some examples towards the end of the podcast. But it doesn’t take much to see how if you start this kind of thing, you focus on the core life support elements, food, energy, transport, et cetera, first, and get people off the grid in a co-op– excuse me, in a node in that way as fast as possible with the Integral system.
So that’s the logic. Post-scarcity is achieved to the– with those elements that are the most important first, which you’d hope in modern market society, people would have at least attempted to do that. Like, it’s a strange blank in the realization of people with this incredible abundance in so many different ways.
But of course, we all know why that doesn’t happen. The second thing I want to address in this general overview is this concept of coordination versus command in the workflow and structure of the COS. As Stafford Beer described, top-down hierarchies may actually have merit in extreme emergencies with very simple goals.
But the variety management that complex systems need to perform well is deeply constrained by command approaches. Hierarchy is a terribly inflexible thing for a structure in a complex system, especially an economy, which ironically brings us back to the old anti-socialist propaganda where pro-market people condemned the command economy of the USSR.
And the claim that’s made is that this command economy, this central planning command economy, just isn’t as self-correcting and fluid as a market system. The claim is that the market system is variety-absorbing, in fact. It’s a dynamic and flexible system that always outperformed top-down command. F.A. Hayek talked about this all the time, uh, in his mid-20th century work on knowledge and information.
And the irony in all of that, even though the price system does have, by comparison, some flexibility, one that is also wildly inefficient, of course, being far too myopic in what it accounts for. But it does match things up. People are constantly moving things. There’s fluidity to it. Even with that being true, the entire business layer, the, the totality of actual institutional organization, management, production, and distribution is literally a top-down command structure, a series of rigid dictatorial hierarchies, literally with direction flowing from the top down and submission flowing from the bottom up.
Uh, there is that somewhat independent nature, obviously, because all the institutions are independent little mini hierarchies and they’re networked together, but it’s a recursive failure ultimately because you can’t have that if you expect true efficiency. And I just think that’s an amusing thing, uh, to recognize in the mass level of contradictions, especially in layers of recursion when it comes to market economics.
But back to my broader point, Beer’s observation that hierarchical organizations lack variety management in complex systems and they are deeply rigid by nature is observably true. Second, we’ve been conditioned to cynically believe that only coercive hierarchy gets things done, as if negative incentives, fear, or losing your job, or the mere scarcity condition itself artificially generated, fear of being poor, are the ultimate engines of motivation.
This is standard psychology and economic theory. While the truth is removing top-down command does not remove motivation, plenty of evidence of that, nor does it sidestep the things people associate with management order, such as having schedules and safety requirements, regulations, and responsibility.
Again, people think just some kind of abstracted anarchy is gonna unfold Integral’s premise is that autonomy, meaningful participation, and clear mutual benefit reinforce responsibility. Rather than asking people to become more altruistic inside this toxic, self-serving, competitive, exploitative ecosystem as we do today, integral seeks to align self-interest with social interest technically, which by the way, is the only way any society survives in the long term, as the world is beginning to find out.
The obvious fact is better production, more reliable services, better integrity, less wasted resources and effort, and more abundant outcomes are shared improvements once again, not advantages to be captured at the top of the hierarchy while the average person is debased. To whatever degree inequality and negative reinforcement is a motivator, it’s way overshadowed by apathy and disillusionment and a general attitude of, of rejection, um, as I think anyone that’s worked long enough in any business enterprise has felt.
So what I’m getting at is that these psychological and sociological factors have to be taken into account when facing such criticism and the general disregard of the very idea that the larger system should facilitate well-being, uh, as a unified process. It’s really a unique thing to bring up to people, this idea that society should benefit people in a holistic sense, society’s economic behavior, society’s productivity, and so forth.
If you ask people about that, and you really sit them down and get them– get those words out of their head like socialism and all that noise There’s no way they can morally disagree with that. Um, the household of a family certainly operates that way. When people realize what they’re doing in Integral has meaning and a direct benefit to them, not just a paycheck every two weeks, their incentives shift dramatically.
Yes, the transitional mechanism that Integral has with direct reciprocity, the ITC system, is a kind of second layer of incentive, and it is necessary. But the broader motivation needs to be understood as sharing the benefits of what the system is doing in totality as things once again move toward post-scarcity.
And since I mentioned post-scarcity a few times, I want to cover something on that very subject before we get into the COS, and that is our sense of human economic activity. To restate a core point, post-scarcity does not mean every responsibility disappears and everyone has everything with nothing to do.
It frightens me when I hear people think that’s what post-scarcity means. The goal isn’t and couldn’t be zero obligation, utopian. It’s meaningful obligation and contribution with direct personal and social benefit, moving once again toward less and less economic pressure to act as more needs are being met over time as a procedural strategy and goal.
Even in the most ideal state though, tools need maintenance, services need organization, communities need people to learn, repair, improve things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s always something to do. So the post-scarcity aim is to reduce unnecessary burdens, improve conditions, and make essential provisioning more reliably accessible, not to assume an automated world simply appears.
And somewhat corollary to that point, sorry to jump around here a little bit on my tangent machine, people often assume that the kind of behavior we’d see in the future in a sustainable system like Integral would mirror the same level of economic intensity that we see today. Absolutely not. What occurs today under the umbrella of productive is literally the exact opposite.
The coercive industrial market system forces everyone to constantly sell something to someone else constantly, constantly, and it’s absolutely insane the waste of life and the waste of time and the waste of resources that means. In a properly working system, economic activity would drop substantially, and rightfully so, with the compulsive ecosystem removed outright.
It’s not hard to imagine a world grounded in basic responsible minimalism where people only work a few hours a week to get things done, having free time. And back to that point about the waste, I remember Buckminster Fuller wrote years ago about this exact issue, the sheer waste of everyday business activity in the coercive market economy with the masses burning all this energy to drive to nine-to-five jobs.
Inspectors of inspectors, that’s what he referred to this sort of, this redundancy. We have a world of inspectors of inspectors, um, all out there doing things, generating more pollution and creating more damage and resource overshoot. And Fuller in this interview, excuse me, he actually suggested most people should just sit home.
They should be paid to sit home, I think his exact statement was, because the damage being caused by all this activity is actually less productive in the long run than people just not doing anything. And okay, so enough of all that. Let’s jump into the COS. First, I’m going to give an overview of the nine modules, and then we’re gonna go through each one in painful, painful detail And there are two ways to understand the overall system dynamics here.
The first is linear, the numbered production sequence, module one through module nine, and the second is cybernetic, circular. And we’re gonna go through each very quickly. The linear view. Module one is production planning and work breakdown. It turns a certified design, which once again is an outcome of the OAD, into an executable plan.
Module two, labor organization and skill matching, connects that plan with voluntary participants and their capabilities, their skills. Module three is resource procurement and materials management, which establishes what materials are required, what’s available, and what needs to be sourced, and from where.
Module four, the cooperative workflow execution, coordinates the activity as it happens. This is the big physical build itself, the workshop, if you will. Module five, capacity throughput and constraint balancing, identifies what is limiting the flow, if anything, of the work in the workshop and helps support solutions or any adjustments as module four unfolds Module six, distribution and access flow coordination, is post-production, and it routes finished goods to distribution channels so people can get them.
It is the access process. Module seven is quality assurance and safety verification, and it checks whether the results meet the requirements. Is a product repeatedly defective in people’s use out there? And that data returns as feedback for adjustment. Module eight, cooperative coordination and inter-coop integration, connects the capabilities and dependencies of multiple cooperatives.
This module has a few levels of intention, which we will get to. And finally, module nine, transparency, ledger, and audit preserves the operational record and supplies traceable information to the wider system, history, accounting, process documentation. It’s the memory of the whole process. So that general progression, linearly, you define the work, you connect participants, you organize resources, you carry out production, you address constraints in that production, you distribute, you verify the results, and you integrate cooperatives as needed and preserve the record of all of it.
That’s how each module contributes. So then we have the circular, a cybernetic view, which means information about what’s happening tends to return to the processes that can respond and adapt. And those feedback flows aren’t only cycling within the nine modules, they’re also moving out to other integral systems, the other four integral systems as needed as an aside.
The white paper’s module interaction diagram on page 187 is worth referencing, and it shows this. The main production flow is connected to return paths carrying information about skill availability, bottlenecks, reliability, ecological effects, and prior production cycles. The diagram is helpful, but it’s not actually thorough.
For example, module four and five, which we’ll talk about, it’s a loop where module four finds problems, module five diagnoses it, catalogs it, uh, works to route problem resolution, so forth. Very, very circular relationship. In module seven, similar. Quality control, uh, has its own return path. Module seven may find that an item needs more maintenance than expected, and that may feed back within the COS or it may go to the OAD.
It may also create a reliability signal for the ITC and possibly send a signal to the FRS regarding system health. It’s also worth noting that module seven isn’t only about products already in use. It’s also an internal check before distribution, which is an important distinction. There’s also a little bit of redundancy with the OAD in this regard.
Um, that’s something I will talk about another time. As far as module six, distribution feedback can reveal, say, that personal acquisition stock is scarce while shared stock sits available, prompting review for different routing. And module nine in this cybernetic point is updating constantly, which means the documentation of what’s happening is itself a live source of feedback during the build, not just a record collected after the fact.
So the linear view follows the work, the cybernetic view follows information that changes the work. Now that said, let’s go through all nine modules in detail. Module one, production planning and work breakdown. The certified design coming from the OAD is more than a blueprint. It contains the instructions for building the thing, the sequenced labor steps, and the estimated hours per step, the skill tiers required as well, along with the tools and workspaces needed, and of course, material and component parts needed.
That’s the labor step decomposition from the OAD, from module six of the OAD to be specific, which I spent again a good amount of time on in the last episode COS Module One takes that package and translates it into a custom node-specific production plan. The OAD describes how the thing can be made.
Module One lays out how it will be made within the confines of the node and, of course, taking into account things like quantity. And before I go further, let’s remember that a node may decide to build something that’s already been sitting in the OAD repository commons for years. The design might have originated in a completely different node, in fact.
That really doesn’t matter because the catalog is shared universally and the design and build data are formatted so any node can read them. That’s a critical consistency element of Integral once again. But again, every node’s circumstance is going to be different, its tools, its people. That’s what Module One sets up, a root-level plan to turn the universal design into reality in the particular ecosystem of a node.
One aside on that, suppose our node looks at, say, a guitar design in the commons and decides it wants to change the design itself. You don’t do that in the CDS, obviously. You go back to the OAD where the design is re-imported for local adaptation, modified, recertified, and the new variant is linked back to the original as a child version.
Once certified, both guitar build versions exist in the catalog. I mention this because it gives a sense of the rhythm here and the potential for design improvement and collaborative engagement I talked about last time. You don’t need corporations inventing things, batching them out, and hoping based on their research people will buy them.
In a market, innovation is a gamble on consumer demand contingent upon mass advertising and the losses, resource, time, and everything else, losses are staggering Think of the products companies have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars on only to have the public shrug. All that time, material, intelligent thought, technicians, all that wasted energy gone.
While at the same time, the trend of successes are frequently just manufactured through advertising, manipulating people’s emotions, status manipulation, and so forth. So all that’s gone. In integral, preference is expressed at the design level before anything is built, and that is an extremely powerful point of origin.
If you organize the society’s production interests based on what people actually think they need organically, it changes the dynamic entirely. You would not have the overflowingly nonsensical world of material nonsense if the thought process was actually people just thinking, “Well, I wish I had a better shovel for this.”
Okay, that’s a very pragmatic thing. “Oh, a computer’s a good idea.” You’d have a step-by-step slow development with organic interest, not this cascade of imposition of, “Hey, you want this gadget over here? This guy has one.” It’s really sick, uh, the kind of waste that comes from that mode of operation, the fact that industry is telling you what to buy as opposed to people just coming up with it on their own and collectively thinking about if other people wanna make it and build it because they all see the merit in it.
So I won’t run that into the ground. Now, back to module one In a sense, Module One does three basic things. First, it builds the production plan. It takes the OAD’s certified design and its reusable build instructions and creates a COS plan with task records for this particular project. Task records, those records meaning the digital entries the COS uses to identify and track the work, get their own identifiers while staying linked to the original design version.
So the core transformation is from the instructions describing how something can be made into a trackable, task-identified plan for actually making it. Second, it establishes the requirements for the quantity being produced. For one item, the per unit labor and material estimates quickly carry over from the OAD, assuming nothing has changed since the OAD accounts for one item’s production.
For 10 or 50 items, Module One expands the task records and calculates the expected totals. These become the starting requirements that the following modules check against available people, materials, tools, and other constraints. Ecological information travels with the plan and gets refined as sourcing and actual conditions become known.
Third, it supplies the ITC with a preliminary production range of information, expected labor by skill tier, expected materials, expected duration, and the relevant OAD ecological and life cycle figures, meaning embodied energy, ecological scoring, expected lifespan, and so on. The ITC uses these as an initial valuation basis.
It’s a shadow value, and it’s important to have that initially. And as work pro-proceeds, verified contributions determine the credits recorded for participants and actual production evidence corrects access value Module one supplies expectations, in other words. It does not finalize valuation, and it does not issue credit for work not yet performed.
Now, that said, let’s suppose our node’s workshop is going to produce 10 guitars. Module one, module one receives the certified design version from the OAD and the batch size, which might come from the CDS decision or a direct request. The software reads the OAD’s labor steps and converts each into a task definition, a reusable description of one operation and what it requires.
Together, these definitions form what industrial engineers call the work breakdown structure. The guitar operations may include preparing the body, carving the neck, installing a truss rod, bracing, all of that kind of stuff, and each task definition carries the requirements for that operation, skill tier, estimated hours per unit, tools, workspace needs, materials, an ecological impact index for the process itself, and all relevant dependencies, meaning which other operations must be finished first, and that last point is an important one.
The plan is not a flat list of jobs. It keeps the relationships needed to organize the workflow. Module one then carries the task instances for the batch. The distinction is simple. Carve the neck is a task definition, a repeatable operation with stated requirements. For a batch of 10 guitars, that definition produces 10 task instances, obviously, 10 identifiable occurrences of the work.
Sorry if I’m overstating this, but let’s just go through it. Each gets its own record linked to the definition and the node and the batch and starts as a pending situation. Those records will later carry scheduling, participation, progress, and completion information as module four tracks the work Now the same batch size then drives the resource calculation.
Module one multiplies the per unit labor and material estimates by 10 and sums the results, labor grouped by skill tier, materials totaled by type. So the workshop now has an expected labor and material budget for the whole run, rather than just instructions for one instrument. Module one also produces an initial estimate of production duration.
The white paper is a bit crude on this, but it’s simply total expected labor divided by an assumed parallelism factor, you could call it, meaning roughly how many tasks can be run at once with a default of three. It’s a starting estimate, not a calendar. And since every task definition carries its own dependencies, a proper implementation would run critical path analysis over that dependency graph to find the true minimum cycle time, which the paper does acknowledge, and it should be fixed in development.
The plan can also carry forward predicted bottlenecks. In the current sketch, these are just pulled from the design’s metadata, but in practice, this is where module nine’s history from the last time the design was built, if it had been, should feed in. And that can carry over from other nodes, in fact.
Reality from the past informs the plan of the present Okay, so at this point, the work has been defined, but it’s not staffed, it’s not supplied, it’s not scheduled. It’s module two that connects the tasks with voluntary participants. Module three will compare the material requirements with actual inventory and sourcing options.
Module four and five coordinate execution and respond to whatever constraints emerge. Module one provides, hence, the structured foundation all of those processes need. On to module two, labor organization and skill matching. Module one defined the work to be done. Module two connects it with the people who might do it.
Think of it as a smart bulletin board that actually makes suggestions based on comparative criteria. Module two has two inputs, the production plan, obviously, from module one, and a set of personal profiles that live in the CDS as a database, and the COS reads from that database. If you have a node of, say, 100 people, each has a profile describing what they can do, their history of prior work, education, perhaps apprenticeships, which I’ll get to, hours committed prior, hours currently committed, and other relevant data.
The white paper’s version of all this is rather generic. A primary skill, right, and a skill tier, meaning a level of recognized proficiency, which is low, medium, high, expert. Operational skill tags for some finer matching other things. Training targets if they’re doing educational work. Maximum hours preference, which is a self-declared, uh, distinction of what– how much work they want in a given period of time.
Also, current committed hours, meaning what they’ve already taken on in this period, and safety clearances, meaning whether they’re cleared for things that are of a dangerous nature, perhaps welding or chemical use. So that’s the data set that module two works with. Now, before we go into detail, module two does need some clarification because the generalized sketch in the white paper isn’t as clear as it should be, even though much can be inferred, which is why the white paper is written the way it was.
If you wanted a document that tried to cover everything, it would be many thousands of pages long. So I hope people appreciate the necessary brevity of the white paper, even though it does have gaps. What Module Two is for. Module Two works to answer a set of organizational questions that any group of people organizing real work together has to answer.
Questions that the market system answers with hierarchy, resumes, labor competition, wage debate. Integral does it instead as an orchestrated networked collaboration and coordination procedure. The first question Module Two asks is, does the node have people with the skills to even do it? The second question is, who might want to do it?
Who, given clear information about the task, would choose to do it? Third question is, who needs the opportunity? Because work is also how people accrue ITCs in early stages, it needs to be distributed fairly as part of the coordination strategy. Fourth question, who is stretched too thin already? The system tries to protect accidents and people from over-committing to avoid tired, burnt-out conditions.
Next question, who’s trying to learn something new? Tasks aren’t only work to be done, really. They’re how community skill capacity can grow, right? A system should be routing people toward what they’ve said they want to become and facilitate that, not exclude them, hence apprenticeship elements and so forth, which we’ll talk more about.
Next question, is the person qualified to safely do it? Work can hurt people if they don’t know what they’re doing. This is a hard gate. Next question, which is more broad, is where is the node systemically weak when it comes to labor and skill? Not just for this batch, but as an ongoing condition the rest of the system needs to know.
Module Two is the layer that tries to answer all those questions and then hands the answers to the people involved and to the other systems. And in this, concretely, there are basically four things happening. First, it measures the gap between what the plan needs and what the node has when it comes to labor.
This gap is expressed as a scarcity index, required hours divided by available hours. Above one is scarcity, around one is balance, below it is surplus. Simple enough. It operates on two levels, the skill and the skill tier level, and both are necessary because each are kind of blind to what the other sees.
The skill means the kind of work it is, of course. Skill tier means the level of skill or how demanding it is: low, medium, high, expert. At the skill level, the index compares the hours a named skill requires against the hours held by people who actually have that skill. This is the measurement that tells you whether the work can be physically done.
And if it comes back with no available hours, it isn’t necessarily scarcity, it’s absence, which can reroute the thing into an educational condition, training, apprenticeship At the skill tier level, the same calculation runs across four tiers. Total hours the plan needs for each tier against total hours available at each tier, meaning each person’s declared maximum minus what they’ve already committed.
If a guitar batch needs 30 expert tier hours this week and the node has 22 available, the tier index is 1.36. Now, second, module two generates the suggestions. For each pending task, module two scores everyone in the node and surfaces a short list of candidates. Safety comes first, naturally. It’s a blocker.
It’s not even really a score. If you don’t have the clearance as decided prior, you’re not going to be recommended. Then skill and tier fit. Do you do this kind of work at roughly the level of expertise needed? Then training or educational trajectory. Is this something that you wanna learn about and which can be accommodated?
Then scarcity, a gentle pull toward where the node is actually tight in this way. Naturally, you do not want a person who can do a rare kind of scarce, scarce task doing an abundant one as a match. So the suggestion coordinates that balance Then it accounts for overextension, a penalty, if you will. If you’ve already committed tons of hours, uh, the system will probably lean against you to avoid burnout.
And somewhat related to that metric, there’s that fairness provision, a preference for people who’ve been getting less work. Say John was out of town for a while, Mary did all this work that John could have done as well. When John returns, a new task arises in that context, and priority will go to John, all else being equal.
It’s not a competition. It’s a self-regulating feature of true equal opportunity, to poke fun at that ridiculous term we see used, uh, in the United States at least today. You add all those up, you sort, you present the top few that result from the equation. And what a person in the node would see when they’re alerted to this or watching a board or whatever the, whatever the means is, it would say something like, you know, “Wheel building is currently scarce.
You’re eligible and it matches your training goals. Would you like to take this?” And they can say yes or no. And third, and this is something that needs to be fleshed out more so, the team approves itself. The team that self-organizes from this board, if you will, after the sort. This is not, again, a selection process that says this is all you can do.
This is still a voluntary process, hence the team that now must approve itself. Because simply volunteering doesn’t mean you’re qualified. Some work is dangerous and some is highly skill demanding, and some may require a certain number of hours and consistency that you don’t have, for example. So there has to be– Even though that would be caught beforehand, but you see my point.
So there has to be a quality control gate, no matter how good people’s intentions may be. Today in the market ecosystem, obviously you arrive with the job with an inflated, uh, resume, and you compete with others across salary rates and all that. In module two, the hourly value of the task is already calculated, so there’s nothing to negotiate.
The only questions are skill capability and the fairness parameters that the CDS set in advance. So in this, there’s a horizontal onboarding process that self-organizes. Basically, everyone who volunteers becomes an applicant by distinction. Everyone. There’s no boss approving you. Everyone’s an applicant universally for the co-op job.
The applicant becomes the review group itself Say 12 people want to assist a hydroponic farm build. They review the workflow together. They look at each other’s profiles and prior projects and experience. They talk directly. And from a team consensus in this way, they decide who should be involved and who shouldn’t, and there will be a dedicated process for that.
So module two sets the stage, then the group volunteers approve themselves. When I say there’ll be a process for that, it’s something to be developed. It could be developed in a node specifically. It could be an approach that’s a template that is universally shared. A CDS variant, again, this is not in the white paper, but you can imagine how people can come together, they begin a formal process of interaction.
And there’s a beauty to this on a level of maturity that people need to kind of think about. If you’re, if you’re thinking to yourself, “Well, someone’s gonna be mad if they just somehow get bumped and they want the job or they need the ITCs.” But what are we really working with here? And people that come into this know that this is about optimizing so the goal can be completed in the correct way, which means there’s no shame to any of this.
No one’s wrong in any of this. If you get deselected by group consensus, you should recognize that as a general reality. Doesn’t mean you have no other opportunities. And built into that, once again, is of course the apprenticeship potential. The system is designed not to just kick people out and say, “Oh, no, go find another job.”
There’s gonna be situations where that might be the case. Again, I’m not using kick people out literally, but you know what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to give the cynical angle here because I know how people think. But instead, if there’s one person that can do this job and another person that they say doesn’t have the experience even though they want to, boom, the apprenticeship becomes part of the equation.
A partial rate ITC could be allocated to the apprentice. These are things that can be fleshed out again with the CDS. But I hope you see the compassionate logic here and the overall concept. We’re not denying people their ability to survive through this system, because that’s what the system does for members that are part of it holistically, as we talked about.
And people have to have a simple sense of maturity and reality that, yes, you have to have an optimized, self-approved group of people that has confidence in each other. And if someone has a bad reputation, which is also something to be considered. I don’t mean reputation in some terrible Yelp review of people complaining about something in an, in an emotional way, but rather someone recognizes that someone new to a node, they didn’t show up for the past three jobs and they didn’t provide a good reason.
So are they gonna feel like they can depend on somebody that is not showing up for their prior work? You see my point. All of this has a self-organizing sensibility, which any of us that wanna get something done are gonna have to be realistic about, especially in a transitional situation where people are coming into an early stage node groomed into that sta- same labor cynicism I’ve talked about before, and maybe they’re just not really into it.
So this is a sense of realism. You’re gonna get damaged people. Uh, if Integral ever gets off the ground, there will be a group of people that are attracted to it, not the majority, but there will be a small group that are there for the wrong reasons. I saw this throughout TZM. If you do anything counterculture, there is a kind of mentality that gets attracted.
They don’t really want to fully understand. And I’m not saying their mentality is static, by the way. This isn’t like some foreign group of thinkers or something. It’s just where they’ve been conditioned. But they’re attracted to something that’s strange or different. They think they’re doing something meaningful because it’s considered radical And finally, once again, as the core procedures in Module Two, it sends its signals and the data that it’s collecting outward.
Suggestions go to Module Four, for example, where they appear on the shop floor board. Scarcity indices go to the ITC. Overextension patterns or chronic shortage will go to the FRS as system health signals, which likely go back to the CDS if there’s an issue, along with things like protocols around training programs and the like.
I hope you’re beginning to get a sense of this. Now, two things I wanna cover in regard to this before we move on of the broad functionality. What we just talked about in general applies to a specific build, visualizing this, um, as, “Well, we’ve gotta do this, so we gotta get everything together organically to do it.”
A standing facility co-op, a repair shop, or a library of things administration works differently, naturally. It makes sense to have semi-dedicated people running those kinds of things on a rotation, so Module Two will help the schedules who maintain it and how that time is shared And on that, again, a lot could be said about different management approaches to a temporary co-op versus an established facility in terms of labor.
But we’ll leave that for another time. But that is basically the distinction. You have co-ops that arise for a particular purpose, co-op meaning the organization of people, everything that organically put together, or you have preexisting co-ops. Or you have co-ops that rise and become preexisting, right? Now likewise, what happens if there’s too little interest in a needed task?
Applicant scarcity. What happens if Module Two sends out its filtered suggestions and despite its strategy to match efficiently and being effective, a task goes without a taker? Well, in such a case, there are about three general reasons. First, potential workers are busy with other jobs. If Module Two is doing what it’s supposed to, this problem should be reduced by its very strategy of matching.
And one option is to consider a kind of swapping or partial job work. In the event a project arises that isn’t anticipated and if a person is doing a low-tier job over here but can rather do a high-tier job over there, for example, for another project that has scarce needs that are needed, scarce skills that are needed, uh, then real-time shift can be made to exchange out workers based on that kind of skill level, level priority.
That’s not a complex coordination process, and it’s easy to visualize how that can be done. Second reason, the node itself lacks the skill overall, as touched upon prior. This means there needs to be a push to educate people to balance things out in the node-level skill pool. A node can build an educational library for skills that are lacking, along with increasing incentives for training apprenticeships once again.
Common sense community self-correction. While it’s very difficult for people to think this way in our market economy, people can be compensated to learn. Kind of makes sense that they would be in this transitional phase once again. So a node realizes it needs certain skills. It t- discusses the problem in the CDS.
It moves it to the OAD for minimal reason, but there might be some kind of planning involved, such as the design of a room or rooms or a facility. It then moves to the COS, and what you do is you have the people that are good with those skills begin to instruct, create educational environment, along with perhaps apprenticeships, and you use ITC rewards for that educational purpose completely logical.
Makes perfect consistency sense because of the investment, so to speak, into people being able to do something. Anyway. And a third common reason for a lack of response is that people with the skills are there, but for some reason they’re not responding. Perhaps they’re confused. Perhaps there’s– they disagree with something that’s happening, uh, and this can be raised as a CDS concern.
It might be a lack of optimization. The way the actual profile of the job was written might be completely distorted. So that’s a different level of correction as a kind of communication problem And that said, I want to talk a little bit about this issue of the COS link to the IT sys- ITC system to produce dynamic weighting as a transitional incentive in the event it comes down to motivation on a general level if a skill proves scarce, for the index reflects it and the ITC automatically raises the weighting on that labor skill while the shortage lasts.
Basic idea that you increase the value of the ITC for the hour when the skill is short. This is talked about in the white paper, and this can be a long-term or a short-term phenomenon. A single project may need a skill, so it moves the ITC value from one to, say, 1.2 per hour. People see that. They are not only noticing that the issue is scarce, which is important information in and of itself, they may, may be more inclined to take that role because of the extra incentive.
And once again, related to what I just said before about education, if there is that larger node scarcity, you have an ITC value that’s also elevated in that way to inspire people to learn. Not only to compensate for the learning, but also to reward them after the fact as the whole system balances back out, and then the ITC, if it’s at one– if it’s at 1.2, will go back to one on the broad level, uh, when the gap is filled.
Short-term or broad, it’s the same basic dynamic. Now, when the white paper came out, a lot of people criticized this idea of labor weighting as it seemed to recreate price elitism in their mind. The fact, obviously, that a lawyer makes 100 times what a construction worker makes, for example. I want to be very clear here about the intention, um, and my personal position, frankly, and the caveats on all this when talking about economic coordination versus a moral position of human value.
Integral is aligned with the basic time bank egalitarian principles put forward by Edgar Cahn, who founded time banking in 1980. The overall theory of equal value labor holds. Everyone in that system had equal value no matter what they did, and there’s a beauty to that simplicity and a profound implication to that simplicity.
One hour of anyone’s time should be valued the same in all cases in moral principle is my point. No matter how one twists and turns, no one can actually prove that the value of a heart surgeon is higher than a street sweeper when both vocations are needed for society to run. The chain of causality is too nonlinear to know.
When Edgar Cahn formulated his theory of value, if you will, it came from two contexts, actually: community service the mutual aid system he promoted, and the IRS distinction, the legal distinction of market value and trade. Kahn’s core premise was that the market systematically assigns zero or near zero value to exactly the labor that holds society together.
Caregiving, mentoring, being a parent, checking on neighbors, familial and basic routine neighborly things, societal stuff. His argument was that the core economy of family and community is the foundation that the market economy sits on, in fact, and that pricing it would destroy the thing that makes it valuable.
Equal hour accounting was how he refused to import market valuation into that space, in other words. At the same time, there was a practical dimension. Differential rates of pay would require someone to decide those rates, which means hierarchy and disputes And finally, he had this tax exemption issue that solidified his position, which we’re going to have to think about.
Uh, the tax exemption he negotiated literally with the IRS in the United States rested on that there be no market valuation, market valuation occurring. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth mentioning again. Uniform hours help that argument considerably, even though it’s a gray area. While Integral needs to concern itself transitionally with things like tax legality, it can’t base its true workable functionality on such constraints in the end.
While strategy is going to be important here, what Integral is doing is larger than this simple community service provision, which works in that minimal form with a flat equal basis for hourly work. Integral is fostering a more complex, more variety-entrenched economic coordination, including using hourly weights to adopt temporal issues of imbalance through that incentive.
And that fact, I will attempt to assure people now concerned about tax issues, does not actually equate to a market value. It’s still its own independent system. Again, more of that could be talked about later. So the white paper throws out a wide net in this regard. It has value shift for scarcity, as noted, and skill tiers, even though the paper states outright that this is an option and not a fixed feature.
In fact, all of that doesn’t have to be a fixed feature in general, and it shouldn’t disturb the interoperability between nodes in the network. My view at this stage, middle ground is the best place to start between the COS and ITC labor valuation, where the scarcity element will remain, but skill tiers remain equal.
There are no differentiations. Doesn’t matter if a person has a higher skill or someone is a novice. And let’s remember a core common market defense of this high-value pay scale today. The cost of education once again. You hear that all the time. Doctors argue they get paid higher rates because they had to pay enormous sums to do long periods of training to get their MD.
And it’s certainly a true thing, but true in the context of the market system. In the Integral arrangement, that is compensated for, or at least completely free. I’m not going to give absolutes here, but at least free. And we’ll talk more about that again in the future. Moving on. Module three: resource procurement and materials management.
Okay, module one defined the work and set the stage. Module two strategically connected it with the other people who might want to do it. Module three asks the more obvious question: Do we have the stuff to even do it, the tools, and how do we get the materials? How do we optimize access and use of those materials and tools, et cetera?
Module three has basically three inputs. The first is the production plan from module one, which carries the material requirements. And remember, those requirements trace back to the OAD, which already computed seven ecological coefficients for every material in the design, embodied energy, embodied carbon, toxicity, recyclability, water use, land use, and scarcity.
So the ecological character of each material is already established before the COS ever touches it, and hence the COS has to know what it costs here in the node, depending on where this particular kilogram comes from and how much is needed for the batch. And obviously, when I say cost, I’m not referring to financial evaluation, not in this context.
Local aluminum and aluminum trucked in from 2,000 miles away are the same material, but with very different real footprints, in other words. A second input is a snapshot of the node’s local material stock, what is on hand, so to speak, what is physically there. Then you have reserved kilograms, meaning already claimed by another plan or project that’s also in the works.
Then you have incoming kilograms, which are expected but have not arrived yet. You have a minimum safe level, the floor you don’t draw below, and an ecological impact index per kilogram for the internal supply, which is the OAD’s baseline adjusted for how the node actually obtains and processes that material.
And the third input regards outside supply. What a kilogram costs ecologically if the node has to go beyond itself for it, usually higher from transport and from losing whatever circularity the internal stream might have had. So in other words, module three answers the basic questions any group producing physical things has to answer.
What does the plan actually consume? The real physical total for the batch to be created. Can we supply it ourselves from what we have, what we recycle, what’s already circulating here? What do we have to do outside the node and what does that cost us? Not in money, once again, usually, in ecological burden and in dependence.
Which materials are tight overall so the rest of the system knows where the pressure is and can think about that and move against it? And overall, what should change because of all this information? A material that’s chronically scarce or chronically external may be a design problem, not just a procurement problem.
So module three tells you what your material situation means and routes that meaning to the systems that can act upon it. It isn’t just inventory accounting, in other words. Now, what are the three core things module three does? Three things happen. First, it commutes what’s needed and what’s usable. Sum the material each task instance consumes across every instance in the plan.
That’s what’s needed. For what’s reusable, start with what’s on hand, subtract what’s reserved for other plans, then add a portion of what’s incoming The default confidence for this is 60% because incoming stock is uncertain and you shouldn’t plan on it fully. Then subtract the minimum safe level because you don’t draw the node below its floor, and you clamp that to zero.
So say you need 40 kilograms of aluminum, the node has 50 on hand, 15 reserved, 20 incoming, and a safe floor of 10. That’s 50 minus 15, which is 35, plus 60% of 20, which is 12, giving 47, minus the floor of 10, giving 37 usable. You allocate 37 internally and flag three kilograms to be sourced from elsewhere.
Second, module three works down a sourcing hierarchy logically. White paper’s a bit vague on this, but there are three places materials can come from, and they’re not equivalent. So the internal stock, once again, what the node already has, whether acquired before, produced here, or recovered, meaning it could have came from repurposing or recycling.
Second, you have internodal acquisition, another integral node supplying what this one lacks. So the ecological figures in that case would travel intact because the sending node already computed them under its own conditions, though it could be double-checked. And much could also be said about the general balancing of the larger node network If one node has surplus, obviously it benefits the whole network to coordinate rather than hoard.
But it has to be done strategically in the same kind of reciprocity you see with individual labor. But I’ll leave it at that for now. This is explored a bit more in the white paper. And third, you have interface acquisition using the interface co-ops as again discussed prior, breaking the boundary with the legacy market economy, which will be very common in the early stages of integral development as the total network tries to fortify itself to avoid that and increasingly so.
In this process, the node organizes to find funds and actually buy the things from the market itself. Money crosses tax and legal exposure assumed, assumed, and the ecological impact data is ascertained as best you can for I- ITC value, uh, adjustment. And again, remember, a young node that is going to be highly dependent on the external legacy market isn’t, by force of what integral is, trying to replicate industrial civilization as we know it.
It’s working once again to cover its core needs: food, water, basic tools, repair capacity, energy, telecom, transport with the simplest sufficient means. Not to mention a preliminary kind of practice strategy, if you will, where you try to work first with what you have within those parameters. If you know you can’t do something because of contingent on high reliance on the legacy market, well, try to avoid that for the initial stages and start to get better at smaller things.
Because remember, it’s all transitional. The fact that you have to get something from the legacy market in early stages of integral should not deter people’s belief in what the system is going to do if you understand how the progression will unfold Let’s say a young node wants to build a hydroponic farm.
The members pool their own financial resources and acquire what’s needed through the interface mechanism under whatever procedure the node’s CDS has put forward and agreed upon. The farm is created, then produces food from the farm that never touches the market at all, servicing it as, as need be, moving towards self-sufficiency with its own internal resources.
Do you see the pattern? You have that kind of first initiation with the market to get what you need, and then you internalize all of it. Interface acquisition to establish a capability followed by complete internal operation. You just have to get it started, which then raises another important question.
Who owns the land the farm sits on or the equipment that may have been purchased from the outside? That’s certainly a requirement from the perspective of the traditional state, which invites a basic legal structure, a nonprofit configuration. I’m not gonna go into too much detail on this, there’s lots to say about it, but the most logical arrangement is a trust-style entity linked to the community node as a nonprofit, meaning assets are held by the legal entity whose purpose is serving the node’s membership.
There are no individual owners. Nothing can be sold off or distributed to other individuals unless the entire group agrees to it. And going back to Edgar Cahn, remember something about this legal issue. The time bank exchanges aren’t taxable because they’re mutual aid rather than commercial activity.
The interface entity buys and holds. The reciprocity inside the node is a completely separate matter, and that separation is what keeps the legal position clean because we’re not transacting. Anyway, moving on. And third, module three computes the scarcity and ecological impact, and the scarcity index works the same way it did in module two.
What is required divided by what is usable before allocation. Using the aluminum figures, 40 over 37 is about 1.08, mildly scarce. The ecological accounting is one multiplication per source. Internally sourced kilograms times the internal impact figure gives the internal burden. Outside sourced kilograms times their impact figure gives the external burden.
Sum each across every material in the plan and you have two batch totals, the internal footprint and the external footprint That split is the point and the first place in the pipeline where an actual production run carries a real ecological number rather than the OAD’s per unit estimate under those early assumed conditions.
20 bicycles sourced the way they were actually sourced cost this much, and this proportion of it came from outside the node. A batch with a burden of 100 sourced internally is a different thing from one with the same burden where 70 were brought in. The ITC gets both figures, and the FRS watches the ratio over time because the ratio is the node’s independence made into a number Now, if impact data is missing for an outside material, the system doesn’t assume zero.
It applies a conservative fallback, 1.2 times the internal figure over 1.0, whichever is larger, and raises a flag. If a material appears in the plan that isn’t in the nodes catalog at all, that’s flagged as a data problem or a mismatch. The OAD’s bill of materials and the COS inventory basically aren’t speaking the same language, in other words, and that’s a technicality to be fixed.
And then Module 3 sends its critical signals outward to the ITC, material scarcity and ecological burden per material and per batch as inputs to access value to the OAD, materials that are repeatedly scarce, repeatedly interface sourced, flagged as a redesign issue or a substitution target logically to the CDS where the two outside dependencies route differently.
A persistent internodal dependency is a strategy question. A persistent interface dependency is a different animal, an autonomy problem and legal exposure. And to the FRS, the trend lines, interface dependence over time, extraction pressure material- materials approaching their safe floors, and the ratio between federated and market sourcing as well, et cetera.
While also in the internal structure of the COS going to Module 5, material strengths that will affect scheduling. The guitar example in the paper shows the whole thing in practice. So basically spruce tops locally harvested and sustainably managed are low impact. Maple from a regional forestry cooperative, moderate impact.
Exotic rosewood restricted to reclaimed stock only. Finishes low VOC rather than toxic. By comparison, once again, the market gives you one number that folds all of this into an abstraction. Module 3 keeps it disaggregated. How much from where, at what ecological cost, with how much dependence? That’s what makes non-market economic calculation possible and far more efficient and accurate beyond other things.
Now, I have quite a few notes on some holes in the white paper for Module 3. It’s a bit too tedious, I think, for this format. I’m gonna put this in a detailed Substack, uh, which will accompany this episode. So anyone listening, by the way, on an audio stream of this podcast, I apologize. You really should be watching the visual on this.
Lots of visual aids here and highly necessary. With that said, we’ll deal with the gaps in that Substack article. So let’s move on to Module 4: Cooperative Workflow Execution So Module 1 made the plan, Module 2 connected it to people, Module 3 secured the materials, Module 4 is where the work actually happens.
I believe I called it the production cockpit in the white paper. Everything before this was essentially preparation, but this is the shop floor. So first, let’s remember from Module 1 that every step in building something becomes a task definition. Every copy of that step for every unit in the batch becomes a task instance, and Module 4 tracks these instances through this life cycle of Module 4 across five states: pending, active, blocked, completed, cancel Pending means the work is defined but waiting to start, obviously.
Active means just that. ITC hours are being logged against it. It’s moving forward. Blocked means it started, but something stopped it due to a problem. Time is generally paused in some cases, depending, and a reason is recorded utilizing a structured tag identifier such as a skill gap, a tool went down, a material is short, the workspace is full or unknown.
These tag identifiers are what module five reads later to diagnose the bottlenecks, which we will get to. And completed, of course, means done. The logged time is finalized. And canceled means withdrawn because maybe the batch changed in size, the plan was revised or something else happened. Very simple stuff in conception.
Pending, active, bounces between blocked if there are issues, problems being resolved, and then lands at completed. Module two suggested the people. Module four records who actually showed up after volunteering and being cleared. That said, module four answers these following questions: What’s happening right now?
Not the plan, but the actual state of each piece of work in progress. Where is it stuck and why? So the cause can be addressed, obviously. Who did what and for how long? Which becomes the basis for ITCs. And how does the reality that’s unfolding compare to what we assumed? Estimates came from the LAD and the plan, and this is the first moment anyone finds out whether they were any good, which is critical as that data allows for constant improvement once again.
That acknowledged, when an instance completes, module four sends what the white paper calls a candidate labor claim to the ITC. It’s a claim, not an event. It carries who, which co-op, which task, how many hours, what skill tier, if applicable, and the plan and batch it belongs to. And again, that stuff’s not set in stone.
This is just what the white paper has put forward as a basic set of parameters. So the claim goes to ITC module one, which applies the critical verification rules that the node has set through the CDS, such as a peer-to-peer sign-off, confirmation by the workshop itself, et cetera. And we’ll talk more about verification processes later, but it needs to be done without hierarchy, meaning a co-op level awareness once again, with safeguards against any kind of bias or grudges or anything like that that can arise, unfortunately.
In most cases, I don’t think it’ll be a problem, but of course, there’s always gonna be edge cases, and we really have to refine those potential edge cases in every possible scenario Now, a oversight in the current whitepaper sketch I do want to mention. Module four, as it stands, keeps a single clock per task instance rather than per person.
So if three people work on one instance and it accumulates six hours, each gets two credits, even if that’s not actually the reality as far as who did how much work in that equation, like if two people did the most work, for example. So that part of the whitepaper does need to be fixed, and thanks for people that emailed me about that.
Now that cleared up, module four ultimately computes total logged time, completed tasks, work in progress, blocked tasks, average cycle time, and estimated hours versus actual hours per task type. That last one is the raw material for module five, which is diagnostic, as we will get into in a moment. And you sum the actual hours across all instances of a task type, sum the estimated hours and divide.
An output ratio of one means the estimate was perfect, 1.6 means it’s taking 60% longer than planned, et cetera. And a lot of this stuff is linked to what’s called Little’s law, a classic result from queuing theory. Cycle time is roughly work in progress divided by throughput. A very old, very robust relationship for checking whether a floor is flowing or clogging.
And I mention it because once again, none of this is invented. Kanban boards, for example, digital shop floor tools, lean manufacturing, again, queuing theory if you wanna look into it, all mature stuff. The difference is that here the information is visible to everyone doing the work rather than to a supervisor, and the response is voluntary reallocation rather than instruction.
Now, regarding the outward feedback of module four, what goes to the ITC? Again, labor claims along with deviation data, which the paper calls valuation realism. If a step consistently takes longer than the design assumed, the access value should reflect the real effort, not the estimate. What goes to the OAD?
Chronic overruns on a particular step as evidence of design problems. Maybe the fixturing is wrong, maybe two steps should be one, maybe a tolerance is unnecessarily tight. What goes to module five? The whole execution snapshot, which is what module five interprets, as we’ll discuss. What goes to f- the FRS, the feedback review system?
Chronic blocking, things like over-reliance on particular individuals, abnormal hourly activity, over hours, and other broader system health issues that the CDS, again, may need to address with problem resolution, training, rotation, et cetera Now on to Module 5: Capacity, Throughput, and Constraint Balancing.
Module 4 facilitates human action. Module 5 tries to make sense of it in real time to avoid problems and find solutions. It’s a diagnostic monitor. Not linear in the pipeline, once again. It’s linear only in the sense that it doesn’t become active until Module 4 starts, and obviously Module 4 has to begin and into its duration before Module 5 triggers, which means in technical principle, it comes after.
If everything is running as estimated, it produces nothing at all. In the code, it’s a set of threshold checks. When no threshold trips, nothing is done, except it does provide information. It proves that prior estimates and assumptions held true, and that info is important on its own. So what it looks for are workflow constraints, we’ll call them, hence problems that arise, a skill problem, a tool that’s broken, something wrong with the materials, et cetera.
Workspace is overfilled, things are taking longer than expected. That’s a dynamic monitoring. And it evaluates the problem. Where is the process stuck? Why is it stuck? And how bad is it? Now, first you might ask, “Well, how does Module 5 get this information? How does it actually get into this diagnostic system?”
Well, the approach would probably be very organic. People do need to be diligent about it. A shared display on a wall somewhere, a phone use. You start a task, you tap it, you finish a task, you tap it. You have to stop because of a problem, you tap blocked and give a reason, selecting from a tag that may be related or the creation of a new categorical tag.
Not everyone needs to do it, just someone. It isn’t complicated and it needs no manager. It is a secondary behavior. If the process gets lazy for whatever reason, people don’t do it, it only hurts themselves because they’re not gonna have the capacity to improve conditions if they go wrong on that level.
So in a sense, the shop is not just working, they’re documenting and generating important data as they go. So again, Module 5 detects this blocking by that kind of behavior, but it also detects deviation, meaning problems that need resolution because they’re going off pace, they’re going off plan. So if an estimate puts a process at a certain duration and it’s obviously running over, the system is accounting for that.
Otherwise, how would you know if your estimates are correct? You need to document it to create the pattern. And then there’s blocked time, so to speak. For each task, what fraction of its instances are sitting blocked, crossing, say, 20%, it gets flagged. So you can see the logic in all of this kind of status monitoring The next thing module five does is score severity.
What is severity in this form? It’s a single number between zero and one expressing how badly a step is hurting production, combining how much it’s running over estimate as well with how often it is stalling. Triage. So a workshop may have six flagged steps at once, and somebody has to know which one to deal with first, and severity is what gives you that order and priority.
For example, the sanding of the wood of a guitar is running 30% over estimate but never blocks, meaning nothing is stuck, while wheel forming is running 60% over and a third of its instances are stuck. So both are flagged, right? But only one is truly stopping the line. So severity in this particular example puts sanding somewhere around .3 and the wheel issue around .95, and hence we know what to fix first.
For the mathematically inclined, severity equals the minimum of one and alpha times the deviation excess plus beta times the blocked ratio. Deviation excess is the ratio minus one, floored at zero. So with the white paper’s bike wheel example, deviation of 1.6, blocked ratio of 0.35 at equal weights, severity is 0.95, a serious bottleneck.
At weights of 0.5 would be 0.475. These weights are again policy, letting a node decide whether it cares more about things running long or stopping entirely, though logically speaking, usually the case would be stopping entirely is a truer problem than just something running long, unless it’s extremely long.
Anyway, you get the point Next, module five classifies, as implied before, which tells you the kind of problem categorically, which helps determine who or what can fix it. Module five reads the blocking reason a member or members provide and decides what the constraint actually is to assist resolution.
Think of this as a template of tags again, simple. Hence something like material routes back to module three as a sourcing question perhaps. Tool issues as a tag means maintenance or second unit, unit needed in held supply, which we’ll talk about more of that in a moment. Skill issue could mean swap or training.
You create tags for different responses, and the tag set itself is node policy, so a workshop can define categories that fit its actual work. Sends targeted messages only to the systems or areas that can actually fix the specific problem. For example, a skill shortage in a wheel building process can go to the ITC, which can raise the weight to draw more people to it in the event we need somebody because someone got sick or something like that.
And it can go to the CDS, which can start training if need be, if we need more people in that skill. Again, the inference presents itself. It might sound to a lot of people that I’m stating the obvious with a lot of this, but that’s the thing. This is relatively obvious, but it’s worth stating because you can get a good picture of the integrity of this kind of system.
And one more example, let’s imagine that there’s a routine build for something periodically and a particular task step always runs kind of long. Well, that means that there may be something in the procedure that needs to be addressed, so that can go back to the OAD as evidence that the design itself has a friction Anyway, enough of that.
Moving on. Module six: Distribution and access flow coordination. Distribution. And this is a big subject that we’ve talked about a great deal. I talk about it in “The New Human Rights Movement” book in this generalized sense of what it means to distribute. For as we all know, the market economy is actually productive.
It’s wastefully productive, but it is productive. It’s not the production part of markets on that level that creates the poverty and lack of access. It is entirely rooted in the distribution. Broadly, the system in totality with the ITC’s general functionality, the non-market-based premise, and other parameters, the modern distribution is already largely solved by the broader structure because so much inequity is procedurally canceled out.
And then the distribution, of course, requires a constant stream of data and trend analysis as well. But down to earth with the actual access channels, we will call them, the finished goods in this module route to essentially one of five channels. Doesn’t have to be these five, of course, but these make the most sense as a general universal baseline.
Personal acquisition channel, private possession, ITC credits extinguished in the acquisition. The data is recorded and someone gets, say, a pair of shoes. Second channel, shared fleet. These are pooled goods used very often like a set of public bikes, similar items that are used frequently in constant rotation Three, a goods library.
Similar to the shared fleet in a way, but more dispersed, more random use, in fact, and also many other things. You know, the tool library is always the best example, but it doesn’t have to be just tools. Naturally, a person may need a drill only a few times a year. This could apply to many things in theory, musical instruments, toys, banquet tables, whatever.
Fourth channel, essential service. These are resources that are high priority and critical to everyone’s needs, community needs, and health, such as water filters, solar panels, medical equipment. You get the idea. In fact, you expand this to production components itself, right? Because if you want to keep your food system going, it’s not one entity.
You do have things, components that you need for infrastructure when things break and so forth. And the fifth layer, which relates to the fourth, the repair pool. This is about having backups for high-use items and components for core services. Not backups for everything, but things that are very, very common.
Obviously, the essentials would be the most important. For example, a node might have 100 bicycles in circulation, and module seven’s quality data, which we’ll talk about in a moment, says they fail at about 2% a year. So you prepare for that. Only two failure is expected annually, so you hold two or three units in the pool to be available for that.
Likewise, you can have personal acquisition, trade-in. This is something that’s thin in the white paper as well. Something breaks, doesn’t get thrown away. It gets handed back to the co-op or a shared co-op or a specified co-op the node uses. It doesn’t have to be the exact point of origin, but a repository, so to speak, a reservoir that takes in these items to be repurposed And once again, just to reiterate something I passively said a moment ago, obviously component pool, spare pumps for vertical farm system and all that, uh, is critical to have.
In fact, that’s probably the most important area is the maintenance relationship to these– to this repair pool. You get the idea. And also remember, once again, these feedback processes. If something is constantly breaking that needs to get something from the repair pool, you wanna optimize over time so that gets as diminished as possible.
Common sense feedback, constantly self-optimizing, nothing is let go. And God, if people just did that in the world today rather than fall back on the incentive of planned obsolescence and constant economic turnover, the world would function in a very different way, uh, on that level alone in terms of the stability of the technological reality and physical reality, you know, car accidents, all the things that we see.
And those five channels essentially covered. Actually, one more quick thing to add on that feedback relationship, just to remind people about what the goal is here. All the metrics in this distribution process and problems and bottlenecks, they all help the access abundance calculation. The least amount of resources and energy put forward to provide the most for the most people with a constantly streamlined understanding of what people actually need to avoid deficiency.
Tight, clean. Will there be issues? Of course there would be, but the entire machine is fluid. But every cycle of every parameter of every distribution is constantly tightening and self-correcting towards making sure people have what they need. And the efficiency of that lack of waste ultimately is what leads to the access abundance again, getting people to have things for free to– for the most core things in their life, and then eventually everything over time, even though I won’t use that type of utopian gesture.
But you see what I’m, I’m getting at here. This is how you do it. This is how you create post-scarcity Now moving on, likewise, module six is constantly checking whether there’s enough to go around in each access context. So the node knows whether to produce more and the ITC knows whether to adjust access costs relatively.
It does this by comparing available stock against pending requests in each channel. First, an availability index. Stock divided by requests capped at one. If 12 people want a personal bike and eight are available, availability is .67. If five people want a shared bike and eight are available, it’s 1.0. Then there is a backlog ratio.
Unfilled requests divided by total requests. Four out of 12 personal requests go unfulfilled, so backlog would be .33 Module six combines these into an overall scarcity and backlog figure and generates a bounded advisory multiplier for the ITC clipped between 0.7 and 1.5, so a shortage can never spiral into goods becoming effectively unreachable.
In this particular example, the multiplier lands around 1.13. Personal bikes cost slightly more in integral time credits, while shared access stays easy. When things get tight, the system nudges people toward sharing rather than competing for personal ownership is the point. Now, module six also sends the FRS a long horizon signal with two figures, a scarcity index and an underutilization index, the latter being a proxy for lots of stock with weak demand.
The underutilization measure is there to catch misallocation, in other words, which is a subtler failure than shortage, but still relevant. And in the spirit of being a little bit more concise here, I again have a number of things that are glossed over, gaps in the white paper, uh, but I’m not going to go through that again.
I’ll put this in a substack. All right. Moving on. Module seven: quality assurance and safety verification. Module seven ensures that physical reality matches the designed model. OAD module nine certified the design on paper through simulation before anything was produced. Yes. Likewise, COS module seven inspects what was actually built, tracking functional performance and producing metrics for self-correction.
Both are necessary, obviously, and neither replaces the other. A certified design can still be built badly. There’s some overlap in the OAD module array that talks about this. It’s another ambiguity, which if you misread it, you think that testing is happening in the OAD, but it depends on what is being tested.
If you’re doing software testing, yeah, you can run that in the OAD. But obviously, if you have a physical good, then you’re going to need the COS. Doesn’t mean the COS can’t relate to something in software because there are larger order conditions with software’s existence. But again, you see my point. But anyway, the testing criteria travel with the OAD design itself.
The spec already carries the expected failure rate, expected lifespan, expected maintenance hours, and a set of tests across five categories: function, safety, durability, maintainability, and ecological compliance. So the design tells the workshop how to check the design In a market, once again, quality standards are set by the producer or by a regulator who is often captured.
Profit distortion, again present on many levels, sabotaging quality for the sake of repurchasing and cost efficiency, as has been talked about. Sorry, I can’t help myself but to bring this stuff up again because the relationship of what we’re trying to do here with this sustainable approach versus what’s actually happening, even if you see what I’m talking about as unrelatable, if you’re listening to this glazed over because you don’t have the technical vocabulary per se, and I’m doing my best, but please be excited about something like this because what we’re doing now is just fucked up.
Anyway, module seven is the mechanism that makes sure what is made is optimized for lifespan and overall utility to the best the system can manage at any given time, right? It’s only one part of a broader efficiency calculation that starts with the OAD, but it’s the part that verifies whether what was expected of production was actually met.
And if it wasn’t, voom, correction is sought so optimization continues, the feedback flows. While it’s mildly vague in the paper, verification basically happens in two places, during in combination with the end of the production run before anything ever gets distributed and after actual public distribution, drawing on all that feedback we’ve covered Did a number of bikes quickly need the same repair as recorded by a repair co-op?
That’s the kind of stuff Module seven deals with. So more technically, as per the math in the white paper, Module seven samples the batch, defaulting 20%, and distinguishes two different numbers when it aggregates. The test failure rate is failed test runs divided by total runs. Basic. The unit failure rate is units that failed at least one critical test divided by units tested.
Safety features are also tracked as their own separate count, so a structural failure never dissolves into an average alongside a kind of blemish. And from there comes the valuation adjustment. Module seven compares the observed unit failure rate against the expected rate to get a performance ratio. If failures run higher than predicted, it issues multipliers that shorten the expected lifespan, raise the maintenance expectation, and modestly increase the access obligations and ITCs.
If failures run lower, lifespan increases, maintenance drops, and the access obligation falls. So improvement lowers costs, not competition as per the market system. Again, I can’t help myself but do these comparisons. At a ma– A manufacturer that builds something that lasts twice as long has cut their own replacement revenue in half, right?
Which is why planned obsolescence exists as a strategy. In Integral, building something that lasts longer makes it cheaper for access for everyone, and the reward goes to the entire community rather than it being extracted from by producers. So then the signals go outward. To the OAD, redesign triggers when reality diverges from simulation.
The paper’s example is humidity-related neck warping on the guitars, which prompts a geometry update, if you will. To the ITC, the reliability multipliers. To the FRS, the feedback review system, critical safety features, and ecological non-compliance, which are system health matters rather than valuation matters.
You want people to be safe in the usage of anything. Such data should also go to Module six, since the rising failure rate means the repair pool needs a larger buffer to keep the same in the event of replacement swaps. And again, there are some gaps I want to cover in the white paper, but we’ll put that in the Substack.
Moving on, Module eight: Cooperative coordination and inter-co-op integration Now, every module so far has looked at a production batch, how it’s planned, who’s doing what, what it consumes, how it’s going, where it may be stuck, where it ends up, distribution, and whether things came out right. This module is a bit different, focusing on the overall structure of the process, not how production is going, but what production is standing on, if you will, and what happens if there’s a failure of the support of the entire process.
So a node can be performing fine on the surface, while actually there is a vulnerability where one small thing could go wrong and the entire process, uh, comes to a halt or collapses. So a machine goes down, a supply chain breaks, uh, something with a resource. Naturally, as I’ve implied, all sorts of safeguards are built into this entire machine of Integral to avoid any of these issues.
And that’s the kind of thing that Module Eight scans, which includes inter-co-op relationships as dependencies and dependencies for interface co-ops moving to the leg-legacy economy. And the key term here in the white paper is cooperative units. What the paper does is generic, defining a cooperative unit as any organized area or workspace or service contributing to the production.
Each cooperative unit has a scope: internal, meaning inside of the node; federated, meaning another Integral node is involved; or external and transitional, meaning outside the network entirely. And each cooperative unit has its defined capabilities, which can be areas of the workshop as well, the frame welding, wood processing, uh, stains and chemistry.
And it’s the cooperative unit that can fail, whether it’s part of a workshop or it is a separate co-op node. And each of these capable identified units carry three figures: a maximum throughput, meaning how much it can handle in a given period, which tells you whether routing more work there is even possible, right?
You have a co-op that’s overrun. A current utilization from zero to one, as per the white paper, showing how loaded it already is, so you can see whether there’s slack or whether it’s running at the edge. and a quality score drawn from module seven’s history, meaning how well work is coming out of that unit and how things held up, basically.
Those three compose a dependency map, allowing you to have confidence if you can rely on that unit. And so for any given production, module eight builds this dependency map, which unit proves which capability, what share of that capability’s demand routes there, and whether the link is critical, meaning production halts if it fails.
And from that map, it computes two numbers. And before we go through these examples, what these examples are actually framing is a federated arrangement between two different nodes, but it’s a recursive structure, so the same qualifications happen within a node in a co-op arrangement as well. But it’s not described that way.
Anyway, bear with me. Uh, it should make sense. First is autonomy. Take the internal share, add 0.7 times the federated share, subtract the external share, clip to zero, one. Production entirely inside the node scores one Entirely federated scores 0.7, still inside Integral, just not inside the node. Entirely external scores zero.
And the point is to reward self-reliance while recognizing that federated dependence is qualitatively different from market dependence. Second is fragility. This uses a Herfindahl-style concentration index, which is, with some irony, a standard tool for economics for measuring market concentration. You take each unit’s share of the total process, square it, and sum.
One unit doing everything gives you one, maximally concentrated. Four units at a quarter each gives 0.25. 10 units at a 10th each gives 0.1, obviously. Then add a penalty for critical external links, 0.3 times the share running through them, and clip. So fragility rises when work is concentrated in a few hands or when it depends on something outside the network that could be very vulnerable.
And what it does with those two numbers is this. The ITC gets a bounded advisory multiplier, one plus K plus one times fragility above a reference point minus K two times autonomy above a reference point clipped to the same 0.7 to 0.15 band used elsewhere. The interpretation is that a good whose production is fragile and externally dependent carries a much higher systemic burden, and that should be visible in the access value.
It is a pending vulnerability. And the FRS gets the autonomy index, the fragility index, the external share, and a count of critical external links tracked over time as a resilience trend And the CDS, of course, becomes actionable. Module eight doesn’t fix anything. It produces maps and the two numbers.
Long story short, this is how resilience gets established, or at least it’s one way to do it, but this is the idea. Module eight is how the system keeps that dependence visible instead of letting it become an invisible assumption. So a node can consciously work its way out of that dependency over time because it is anticipating a vulnerability.
And I’m not quite convinced if I made this clear enough before. It’s wrong to make the assumption that module eight only matters when there are multiple nodes or inter-node co-ops. The concentration index doesn’t care about node boundaries. If one workshop does all the welding, that’s a single point of failure, whether or not other nodes or other types of institutions exist.
And a single isolated node needs the external dependence picture more than a federated one, since it has no neighbors to fall back on. And in a very small proto-node with one or two co-ops, obviously there’s very little fragility access. Module eight doesn’t really do much yet. And finally, on to the final module, module nine, transparency, ledger, and audit Everything that happens in every COS module is recorded, and Module Nine is where the memory of production, which serves several purposes, some immediate and some with downstream potential as historical record.
And Module Nine’s record keeping serves three things. First, ITC calculation. Once again, the ITC system can’t compute an access value without knowing what actually went into a thing, hours by skill tier, materials consumed, ecological burden, failure rates, and so forth. Second, the FRS, which can’t monitor the node’s overall health and its operations without a running history to look at, seeing what changed, when, and whether it gets better or worse, critical trends.
And third, general accountability. The community can’t hold any of this accountable without being able to see it, obviously, and Integral is dedicated overwhelmingly, obsessively to transparency. A system that computes value from production facts is only trustworthy if those facts are inspectable by the people living under them.
This is not a black box system. Integral demands being questioned. It is complex to a degree. It depends on your level of basic education with some of this stuff. But if a person wants to understand exactly what has happened and by whom and what, to the degree of privacy, which we’ll touch upon, they can go and find that data.
Hence, the goal is not only feedback improvement, but developing that sacred trust that is so missing in the world today that thrives on deceit, which is the core engine of market differential gain So regarding COS record keeping via Module 9, the other modules output data regarding notable actions. You have things like somebody starting the task, something being consumed, something is tested, distributed, repaired, reported an error, and so on.
Everything becomes an event on a ledger. Labor events, material events, workflow events, QA events, distribution events, coordination events. Each carries an ID, a type, a cooperative unit, a good, a version, a timestamp, and a payload with the specifics, and so on. So a labor event holds the task, the worker, the workers, the hours, the skill tier, who verified it, and so on.
And the log created is append only naturally, meaning nothing gets edited or deleted, and each event is hash chained, meaning when an event is added, a kind of fingerprint is computed from its own contents plus the fingerprint. Change anything in the past event and every fingerprint after it breaks, which makes tampering extremely detectable, which is what the FRS does in part From that record, module nine produces summaries.
For the ITC, a production summary over a time window, raw and weighted labor hours by skill tier, material consumption and its ecological weight, units completed, units that failed, QA once again, average failure severity. These are all important. More specifically for the FRS, a system trace with the totals and the ecological aggregate.
And before either is produced, an integrity check walks the chain and verifies every fingerprint, as just stated. Now, regarding a quick confusion in regard to redundancy, as we discussed, other modules in the COS are sending data outward to other subsystems, again, the FRS and ITC, as we go along through the pipeline and with diagnostics.
So you have an overlap, and it has to do with timing overall, along with a kind of cross-verification. For example, module four sends a labor claim the moment a task completes because it needs verifying while people still remember the work, right? And again, verification is something we’ll cover another time, as mentioned.
Module three’s scarcity signal, module five’s weighting suggestion, module six’s availability figure, these are current conditions the ITC needs immediately to credit labor now or adjust access now, decisions that can’t wait until module nine. So to recap that, module nine’s summary comes after the whole batch is done.
It closes the book on production run. This batch consumed this many weighted hours, this much material, this much ecological burden, and this failure rate, et cetera. That’s what the ITC ultimately uses to compute the final access value of the good itself, which is a judgment that really shouldn’t be made until the run is actually finished, needless to say.
As far as consistency checks built on this record, the labor hours ledger should match the labor figure the ITC used in valuation. The ecological total should be the same number the ITC and the FRS both use. And the observed failure rate compared against what was projected triggers review if it strays too far.
Most of the time, those will match automatically since they come from the same record, but there are discrepancies that can arise, likely disagreeing in two situations. Something got lost or counted twice in handling, some kind of procedural, perhaps software error. And the early numbers reported came as the plan was happening while the ledger shows what actually happened, and those can have two different sources And a lot more could be said on all of this, but I think you get the point as far as the FRS dynamics in this regard.
But I’ll say one more thing about the historical record use. Uh, obviously, if another node wants to replicate a production, they don’t just have to use the flat design from the OAD commons. You can have another layer of data where they examine the record of another node’s work already done to get a sense of how to do it and the problems they faced.
That could be very, very useful information that’s not mentioned in the OAD modules, but it’s something that could be added. This is that whole operational network intelligence I keep talking about. It’s what turns one node’s learning into the network’s learning, which can rapidly accelerate progress.
And once again, I’ve got my gaps here that, uh, I will– Yeah, I want to mention the privacy issue as one of the gaps. Naturally, you don’t want all sorts of exposed information out there about yourself in terms of your work life in a direct sense. So the CDS comes to terms with that kind of thing. ITC credits do not need to be public for everyone to look at.
There is a data stream for that information, and that’s a conversation to be had. That’s a CDS context conversation. It’s easy to put forward a privacy encryption when it comes to stuff like that, because on one side you do need to understand what’s happening, but privacy should be respected. Frankly, why anyone would want to invade somebody else’s privacy, because there’s nothing really to gain.
It’d be kind of a perverted voyeurism maybe, but there’s nothing to gain by this kind of information. But still, privacy is a sensitive thing from a psychological standpoint, and it needs to be respected. But yes, I will skip the other gaps. Uh, we’ll deal with that in the article. And that is the COS modules one through nine And as tedious as all of that was, I hope people appreciate what’s attempting to be done here, uh, with the painful level of detail, even though it doesn’t go far enough in this solution-oriented thinking I and others are putting forward.
It’s time to work to move past talking about shit like socialism or other vague descriptions of vague economic relations and that kind of lazy fallback on this fight between capital and labor power with unions and policy demands and so forth. Once again, as stated, this cooperative system differentiates, differentiates itself greatly, even though there’s a little bit of technical overlap, as mentioned, with co-ops that we see in the traditional sphere, these socialist co-ops, which I think have always been a failed idea, once again, because they are fundamentally capitalist institutions.
They do not change the actual system. They just create a little kernel of kindness in one part of it. So the COS is this new way as a component of integral. And I wanna conclude this podcast today with walking through a s- grounded scenario that I hope will help put this into focus as far as utility of all this and the kind of foundational thinking, the larger order logic here of what Integral hopes to do So the CDS is the democratic layer.
It’s where the community identifies problems and decides on improvements with no structural hierarchy, without defaulting to representatives to make decisions for everyone else. But what the CDS decides naturally has a boundary, meaning how far a decision can go in detail before it has to move to the other systems for development.
So say the node community wants to create a local sharing network for local transport. This is a running example I’m gonna use here. Local sharing network for local transport. It’s a great example because it’s purposeful and foundationally simple and something that nodes need to focus on when they start, because transport is an important economic reality.
So what do they do? They take it up in the node CDS and develop the idea, and they agree that the CDS should move forward with such a project. That said, the technical requirements will come up in the CDS. And again, I’ll do a demonstration of this in the next podcast. They understand the core parameters in having the, of having the resources and labor to do it, but there’s a boundary there, obviously, because the true technicals can’t be done in that setting.
It’s more of a democracy setting. It has to go to a more specialized setting tailored for that, hence the OAD. The OAD becoming the open collaborative platform where participants actually build the application the access transport network needs to work. So the people interested in working on the app project join the OAD and they work.
Now, as an aside, just to bring up in this linear unfolding, there’s that debate: Should people in the OAD be paid ITCs for their work? As per the white paper, the general rule is creative ideation and democratic engagement are not ITC value. You’re part of a community, and being credited for helping to resolve problems in the CDS should never be needed unless it’s an absolute emergency or something that’s so severe.
But even then, you have to really question whether budgeting something like that out with ITCs is necessary. I guess if someone’s losing lots of time in this volunteer work where they really should be getting some credit because they need it for survival, et cetera, that could change the equation, and that again becomes a CDS decision.
So yeah, but generally speaking, you don’t pay people to vote or to go to their local city council meetings. It’s a distortion to think that way. At the same time, OAD creativity is highly decentralized and usually a passive process, which can be thought about in the same way lots of open source development occurs in the world today in a flow of decentralized volunteered work.
ITCs really should only come into play if there’s a high pressure need that the OAD participants need to get done immediately. And in such a case, it would certainly go through the CDS once again to designate how that is to be orchestrated. And once again, the network power here means that once something is done, it is instantly available to everyone else to build upon or utilize.
So you’re really maximizing the potential of getting these core designs done very, very quickly, even without ITCs because of the network itself, ideally, which is large enough to create that. Now, that debate aside, let’s now assume the rideshare app has been built and local node members are pooling, say, their own vehicles into a shared service, much like Uber or Lyft.
I’ll talk more about the vehicle attainment stuff in a moment because they could also acquire them in the trust, but let’s just start from the most simple premise. I ran some basic numbers on this, and for a node of 100 members spread across a 30-mile radius, only about six cars are really needed to cover everyone’s basic needs, assuming there’s a reasonable distribution of access to the g– those cars.
But again, 30 miles isn’t, uh, that complex. And ITCs are indeed built into the app for the service. Now, the economic calculation for a service like this works differently from a material production. And I’ve chosen this example precisely because it brings forward a mixed situation, like the complexity of a mixed situation.
So two complications at once. First, how the ITC value of a ride is calculated versus how the driver’s contribution is credited. The second is the logistics of maintaining the fleet of cars, which depends almost certainly to one degree or another on the legacy economy for gas, fuel, charging, repair, insurance, and so on, even though you hope that stuff could be rebuilt into the local nodes with co-ops.
So let’s take this service difference first, because it’s more basic than it sounds. When a workshop builds 20 bicycles, there’s a batch, an inventory, a shelf. A ride has none of that. It’s consumed the moment it’s produced, nothing is stockpiled, and every ride is effectively a production run of one. So availability isn’t measured in goods on a shelf.
It’s measured in drivers on shift versus requests coming in. But the COS logic still applies generally almost module by module. Each ride is a task instance, right? The app’s start and stop taps are the time clock from module four. Long pickup times and unfilled requests are constraints for module five to diagnose.
Driver availability at different hours is module two’s scarcity picture. Fuel and tires are module three’s interface inputs, and rider reports and vehicle checks are module seven’s quality assurance. So the machinery holds. It’s just running on something that can’t be warehoused Regarding the ITC values, and I want to go through this again because it’s important.
Remember, ITCs don’t change hands. A departure from both market economics and time bank systems and other variations of them. The rider doesn’t pay the driver. The rider takes the ride, their ITCs are extinguished, they vanish back into the system as historical data, and when the driver’s work is verified, new ITCs are created by the system for them, generated based on contextual economic metrics as noted.
So once again, what the ride costs and what the driver earns are two separate calculations. Nothing is trading, and they don’t have to be the same number and rarely would be, in fact. And I’ll talk more about this in the next podcast once again on the ITC system. But let’s run this down in general for our ride sharing service.
The app is the time clock. The driver taps it when they accept a request and out at drop off. So the drive to the pickup counts too. And the rider confirming the trip in the app is a natural verifier for the ITC’s intake. So verification is straightforward. The driver’s credit is then their time multiplied by the weight band for the work, assuming baseline tier weights are used at all once again.
But even with every hour weighted equally, the scarcity adjustment still applies. If there’s a shortage of drivers, say at 2:00 in the morning, the scarcity index picks it up and the ITC can nudge the weighting up modestly within the bounds the CDS has set. That increases the incentive to drive when it’s needed, while also giving the broader system signal that it’s short that level of information as well.
Again, the goal is always to find that balance so you really don’t have these scarcity based adjustments, but we have to deal with reality. Now on the rider’s side, remember we have three access modes in the COS, and one of them is service use, which is what the ride is. The access value is derived from what the ride actually consumes.
Driver’s time, vehicle’s wear, the energy, gas, ecological burden, small share of maintaining the network and the app, and module six’s availability multiplier. So a ride when drivers are scarce costs modestly more than one when they’re plentiful, as already stated. And since I feel the need to address the ITC once again, and as a quick aside when it comes to this balancing, if people haven’t thought about this yet, people may wonder how the system stays in balance in the ITC system.
Um, in a node of 100 people, the credits people earn have to stay proportional to the credits needed to access the goods and services, right? At least for the things that haven’t hit post scarcity Otherwise, credits pile up with nowhere to go or become too scarce and everything becomes too expensive to reach, right?
In balance. And that is a calibration process, one that holistically organizes value relationships across the cooperative sectors, if you will. Meaning basically three things. First, the ecological and scarcity parts of an access value shift costs between goods rather than adding to the total, meaning something ecologically heavy costs more and something light costs less.
And across everything the node assesses in that period, those adjustments average out. They change what’s expensive relative to what, not how much is extinguished overall. Second, much of what looks like non-labor cost is actually somebody else’s labor. There are people maintaining things. There is a repair co-op fixing the cars, perhaps.
They need to be credited for their work as well, and they are. And those portions of the rider’s cost have already been matched with credit in the system. And third, whatever drift may remain gets caught by feedback. The FRS tracks the total credits created against the total extinguished over time, and if one starts outrunning the other, a single node-wide adjustment to access values is made small and within bounds the CDS has set, and of course, public for everyone to understand.
Now, what I’m describing here isn’t you’re looking at your ITC value and it’s dynamically changing in real time because of calibration. This happens in a linear fashion as things are occurring in the process. What’s happening stays static, it’s already been done, but it’s the modulation of things and the adjustment of things that are happening in the next cycle of process, the next acquisition of ITCs, the next production thing, and so forth.
And as the node matures, once again, access values are slowly moving towards zero anyway, and the balancing act becomes less and less critical in the process Now, how about the COS co-op maintenance of the car fleet? This can go different directions in that legacy economy overlap. Let’s assume the cars are privately owned, as with Uber, as opposed to a dedicated node-owned pool of vehicles.
Once again, those cars require legacy market inputs and relationships, fuel, insurance, depreciation perhaps, repairs. The driver is spending money to provide this service, and the ITCs don’t cover that element. So what are the ways to handle this situation? Well, the money side gets handled at the boundary collectively through the interface cooperative, which could be thought of as perhaps a sub co-op of the overseeing co-op, hence the drive sharing system co-op Or the interface co-op could be more general as designated by the CDS in a small node where there is a dedicated interface co-op that works to handle all the issues for all of the other co-ops, which is not a bad idea whatsoever.
Especially since this is the highly sensitive money reality, you kind of want an interface co-op, if it’s a small enough node, to be right there with the CDS. This is a core part of the navigation of those critical funds, et cetera. So naturally, the node, which even in the middle maturity stage will still have a certain layer overlapping in the legacy economy, it’s not going to go away that fast.
It’s what pools internal resources, money to get the fuel to cover the costs, reimbursements for repairs, and so forth. And of course, the logic follows that you would want to actually establish your own maintenance co-op or cooperative unit in a co-op to deal with just this issue and limit as– limit reliance on the legacy economy as much as possible when it comes to something like repairs of the vehicle.
But I think you get the idea. Obviously, as I touched upon before, you want to just get the resources into the node and stop as much interaction as possible. Having independent drivers use their own vehicles is a good transitional step within the node process, but you’d really want to have your own fleet.
Comes into the trust, the insurance costs and all that are also with the trust. It becomes a community issue immediately and holistically, in other words. Now that said, let’s extend this exercise a little bit further. And again, I’m not giving these examples as an abstract thought exercise, but actually express what early node development really should be focusing on in order to slowly do what it needs to to get off the grid and detach from the legacy market economy.
So let’s imagine that once the first version of the transport app is built and we recognize another inconvenience relying on mainstream smartphones and corporate telecom. So to support node activity more consistently on the level of critical communication integrity, we decide to develop a minimal off-grid mesh phone-type device, and hence replace commercial smartphones.
So back to the CDS we go to propose the idea to see if we think it is somewhat feasible. There is deliberation and everyone decides, yes, let’s try this. So approval is done and the idea moves to be developed in the OAD for exploration. Now pausing there, some may hear this and think it’s absurd. Make your own cell phones?
Build your own telecom network? Run a rideshare app and every other node app on it? We need millions of dollars and hardcore infrastructure to do all of that stuff, don’t we? Well, I’ll remind everyone that the true wealth trend of civilization is, again, ephemeralization, Buckminster Fuller’s term for doing more with less.
Dematerialization and democratization. The Industrial Revolution went through its bigger is better phase, where more output and function meant more input and more power input But that isn’t the true trajectory of efficiency engineering at all. The real trajectory is via information technology and its exponential advance.
Moore’s law being the famous expression of this in the digital realm, but it doesn’t just stop there. Information and its processes underlie everything, and that’s the true pattern of wealth capacity, more with less. Meanwhile, the commercial world, once again chasing infinite growth and profit, depends on this endless cyclical consumption, planned obsolescence, along with this psychological obsolescence and the manufacturing of dissatisfaction to make perfectly good things feel outdated when they really are not.
I mean, seriously, how do people not understand what they’re looking at when they look at a technical accomplishment of s- these modern devices and then they see them in these piles, like smartphones and computers? All of these critical components, uh, things to be reused and just the conception of them where no one thought to build in the improvement into the design to avoid the waste.
It’s insane. Uh, it’s insane that people walk past this shockingly wasteful technological reality and they don’t even think it’s a problem. An intelligent society never in a million years would facilitate a process that throws away in actual waste conception something like a smartphone in this disposable culture.
That wouldn’t even occur because it would be a process of constant innovation and reuse and updating and the ability to build into existing processes and systems, not this buy and throw away, which of course I don’t need to, uh, go into any more than that. But the side effect of this for integral is that we can now do some powerful things with very relatively minimal technology and relatively simple designs if we simply maintain the minimalism.
And so what I did is I did some quick research on this for our integral phone project. So first you have the device. If you combine off-shelf open source parts, a microcontroller like the ESP32, an ink display, an E Ink display I should say, physical keypad, basic GPS module, and a battery, you can build a working unit for basic use for under $50.
That’s without even buying wholesale or undergoing salvaging for thrown away parts, which is certainly an angle as well for one of the co-ops of a node. But anyway, proper node resourcing through interface cooperative methods as discussed, these things can be obtained without high cost. So there’s that.
Second, we have the network itself. In fact, a node-based telecom. Each device relays the signals of others in the mesh, and the community deploys small solar-powered radio relays using low power LoRa, L-O-R-A radios. The more people in the node, the stronger the total network signal becomes Tied together with an open source networking stack like Reticulum, data passes encrypted from device to device across the entire community, forming, in fact, an off-grid subscription-free telecom mesh network, and could be internet related as well.
That’s a different subject. We won’t go into that. And third, of course, this ride sharing app. You make it light. Heavy apps like Uber have all sorts of built-in things that you really don’t need. You just need an offline design. The maps are preloaded on the device. You use tiny data packets, location ping every 15 seconds or so, and on down the line.
All of this can be done today with low-cost open source hardware and a lightweight mesh network. The community can achieve communication sovereignty for, in fact, a fraction tradit- of the traditional cost and complexity of what we deal with today, with a level of privacy and integrity that commercial systems, of course, find unprofitable because they all want to mine your data while assisting general surveillance that, of course, is used by power.
And once again, while what I just described is very minimal and probably rather slow, if every node starts thinking this way, multiple nodes are like, “Yes.” Early nodes, “This is a great idea. We need our own communication system for Integral.” Then everyone starts thinking about it. Everyone discovers different resources and different ways to get them, and suddenly optimization starts to build.
I could say a lot about an advanced bulletin board type of system going back to the retro days of, uh, the early pre-internet, and there’s actually people in China, if I remember correctly, I think Taiwan actually, that are still doing this because they’re circumventing authority for one, and they have it optimized where they’re communicating vast complex data through general internet style activity, but they’re doing it underground.
So these are all fun things to think about to or- in order, once again, to create this kind of independence. And you can hear the exhaustion in my voice. I’m afraid that does it for me for today. But I do hope this helps to give a sense of, uh, possibility to people that are still not quite understanding what we’re trying to do.
On the next episode, once again, the ITC system exploration or the CDS prototype. If I do the CDS prototype, it’s a long podcast, I’ll just do that first, and then I do the ITC or vice versa. Uh, very close with the CDS prototype. In fact, I’m hoping just a few more days, and I will immediately jump on that because I’m excited to present it and I want the feedback This program is brought to you by my dwindling Patreon.
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